Well, after snatching a very SlickDeal on web hosting, I decided that I might as well do something with markstudy.org, which I’ve owned for a couple of months now. The two laziest things I could have done would have been to revive my old website (now at markstudy.com—as usual, it’s not working as well I’d originally designed it) and to start a blog. And so there you have it. (A more interesting thing that I could do would be to set up an online Mark Study reference site. I’ve “started” that by installing Joomla as a content management system, but I haven’t really gotten past that, and I’m not sure if it really makes sense at this time.)
Why am I doing this? I’m not really sure. Anyone have any ideas for me? 
There’s so much garbage out on the Internet right now that I don’t really see the point of adding more. And it’s not that I think that my thoughts are particularly worthwhile, nor do I think that I’ll post particularly regularly. Here are a couple of ideas I had though:
- For starters, I’ve felt ambivalent about spamming my Yahoogroup (most of you are probably reading this post because of my Yahoogroup—I figure it’ll take a while before other people find out about this blog). I started that group back when I thought I would be moving overseas any day and I wanted a good way to communicate with my supporters. I’m pretty sure now that I’m not headed overseas anytime soon and so it doesn’t seem the most appropriate forum anymore. I felt like I wanted a place where I could say stuff that wasn’t necessarily all that significant, but still important to me. This is that place.
- Sometimes I run across neat deals on the web or neat places in Boston (or elsewhere) that I want to let folks know about. It’s often hard for me to figure out whom I should tell and how I should tell them. This seems a decent place.
- I want to start reading books and Scripture more. I thought this would be an okay place to write reviews and reflections. We’ll see if this idea really gets off the ground… I’ve said I wanted to start reading again for years, but I always have a lot of trouble getting into it.
The overarching “chool” thing about this forum, though, is that with the advent of RSS and content aggregators, you can subscribe to the “Reflections” category, for example, and just get that information, without hearing about how I got to try out Amazon Prime for free for four months.
So let me know if you have other ideas about things I could or should write about, and we’ll see if this turns into something significant or just a bunch of noise.
BTW, the “Theme” on this blog is still a work in progress. Let me know if anything doesn’t display correctly or is confusing to use. I know that the Flickr gallery doesn’t display particularly well, but I already spent longer than I care to admit “rasslin’” with the CSS. And the top-level links are most likely going to change as well—in particular, I need to find a better Photos section, and I may link to other content as I create it.
Well, that’s about it for now. If you’re interested, stay tuned to find out what happens!
