I have split my blogs into separate parts: the original EJRH blog, for programming and related posts; and a new blog Variadic for everything else. Variadic means “taking a number of arguments”, which is not perfectly suitable because my posts create arguments more than they take them, but it was the first available name I could think of (even HRJE was taken).
Previously, EJRH was an eccentric mishmash of projects, opinions, interests, hobbies, travel, and personal stuff. This means that no one (aside from the author) was going to be interested in all of it. It was also discordant to point people to my public programming work and have them confronted by all the unrelated bits. It was only sensible to separate them, and with a total of 177 posts to date, there was no longer the excuse that there might not be enough material for an additional blog.
I have not found this separation easy. For one thing, programming is very personal to me (arguably more personal than mere travel or other hobbies). Aside from a few posts that allude to things I’ve been doing at work, my programming output to date has been self-motivated rather than merely professional. Programming is, of course, my vocation: I want that to be clear from the content of the EJRH blog, but I don’t want to restrict it to projects that I’ve merely done for work.
It has been difficult to assign some of my existing posts to one side or the other. For instance, if I play a game and write about it, that’s a personal thing (though I’m more than happy for the public to read my reviews), and definitely not a professional one. But my review of Manufactoria discusses it as a logical system and considers the kinds of programming problems that could be solved in it. So that game review has stayed on EJRH, while the others (Mass Effect, Age of Empires, etc.) have been moved to Variadic. Blogs about astronomy are on my personal blog, but when I get round to writing about the image registration program I wrote, that will have to go on the programming blog. Keep things separate like that doesn’t come naturally to me.
There are many links between posts that are now broken or meaningless because some of them have moved into the new blog. These will be refactored. And some of my posts about the blog as a whole no longer make sense, such as the topological graph of how posts link to each other. That post itself was also a reflective one on blogging, and arguably belonged more on the personal blog than the programming one.
So: EJRH is now about programming (and related stuff). Variadic is for everything else I want to blog about (and is more personal). I have not blogged much in the last two months, but I do have things in draft on both sides of that divide.
