Matt Agnello’s Blog

As a first post, I figured I'd do a bit of meta-blogging and combine both a brief guide to personal blogging with my hopes for this one.

It's important when starting a blog to have something in mind for its future. It's really easy these days to set up an account somewhere on WordPress or Blogger and forget about it, and it's only getting easier (thank you Posterous). Most of my high school friends and I had LiveJournal accounts once, many eons ago. OpenDiary was a source of much drama back then as well. Hell, I was posting fantasy fiction to the Wyvern Library section of Elfwood the year it opened in '96. Does that make me old?

I grew up and matured with what would eventually become the weblog, and in that time I saw many personal blogs -- mostly belonging to friends -- break ground and shoot toward the sky only to wither and die from lack of nourishment. Here are a couple quick rules to keep that from happening to you.

1. Pick a topic and stick to it. Don't let yourself wander except for a very good reason. This will keep you focused and keep your blog from getting diluted in randomness. It will also keep you from blogging about everything and blogging too much, so you don't burn yourself out and make your work a flash in the pan.

2. Know your audience. They'll most likely be people interested in your topic. If your topic is just yourself, they'll be family and friends and people interested in your writing style. Keep your audience in mind when you write: explain things from their perspective and elaborate on things they wouldn't normally be exposed to.

3. Pick a timetable. Know how often you'd like to post and set a goal to hit each day, week, or month. Set aside a specific time to work on your post during each cycle. This will help you remember to post to begin with, but it will also make you a more disciplined writer. And, I can't stress this enough, save a draft before you post. Come back to your draft a couple hours later, read it, and make sure that's what you really want to say. It will make your writing better, and it will keep you from posting something you really don't want to. Remember, the Internet sucks up everything, and you can't take it back later. (That includes grammar and spelling mistakes.)

4. Make rules. Your topic is what you will post about, but make sure you have rules about what you will not post about. On a personal blog with a very loose topic, it's easy for it to become a diary of complaints. If that's your ultimate goal, that's fine -- keep in mind, most people don't want to read that -- but if not, then have a specific "no complaining" rule for yourself.

5. Link often. This is the fun part. You're not just writing a magazine article. The ability to link within the text is what separates you from the opinion section of the newspaper. Link early and often. And, in order to link well, do your research.

So let's see how I measure up to my own rules.

1. Pick a topic and stick to it. I have a filmmaking blog already, and I wanted a place to post everything else. This blog is designed to be a repository of rough ideas and stuff I'm doing not related to filmmaking. That's pretty loose, but I'm sticking to it.

2. Know your audience. I expect only my family and friends to be interested in this because of its rough nature.

3. Pick a timetable. This is pretty loose, too. I'll post things as they become available. Because of the rough nature, I'll plan and edit less, so my goal is to post more than once a week.

4. Make rules. This is a personal blog with a loose topic for family and friends about stuff going on in my life. But it's not my diary. I want to post uplifting or interesting things, so I have a strict "no complaining" rule. That includes complaining about politics, because I can go off ... but I won't, because that's against the rules.

5. Link often. Luckily, Posterous is more like the old weblog style, which was really just a series of interesting links with some commentary, so I'll be forced to link often and mix it up with media. A majority of what I read and work on originates online, so you can trust that I'll have plenty of links to that material. And the more iPhone support Posterous gets, the more crazy things I'll do with it.

A blog is an experiment, and you, the author, are the subject. The experiment is, given a blank space which you can fill with whatever you like, what do you choose to fill it with? And like every experiment, there is no failure; there is only learning a bit more about yourself and the world around you -- and blowing things up now and then.