It appears that it’s time to stop posting music for a little while. The project started to get me thinking about music and writing music regularly, and that it did. However, I want units of music more than a minute now, and the self-imposed push to have something to publish is causing me to make progressively worse tracks — and lately, to make no tracks at all. It’s also preventing me from exploring creative avenues like sound and synth design, as I wouldn’t have anything to post, and I have a strong desire to post. So, the routine I tried to use to get me to write more music now has me writing less music, and that means it’s time to push pause — or more, to invert the rule that I publish what I produce and tell myself not to publish what I produce. The interesting lesson, to me, is that a good routine can be creatively liberating for a while and then become creatively stifling, and the important thing is to know when that’s happened. 

After looking at how I use this space, I’ve decided to move it to Tumblr for the time being; although I like SquareSpace lots, I really post more like a tumblr user, and tumblr is substantially cheaper than SquareSpace. I also changed the domain, because, well, I do that from time to time. I’ll setup redirects from blog.mattbowen.net and all the old URLs to their new ones shortly.

Now that I’m on Tumblr, expect slightly different usage; one of the fun things about Tumblr is how easy it is to not interesting things on the web, and that’s something I like to do anyway. It’ll probably take a little time to get a usage pattern, but hopefully it’ll be fun all the same.

So, really, how many blogs are too many blogs? I’ll answer this question with: 1 more than you have discrete audiences and topics that don’t really overlap. I’ve decided the correct number for me is likely two: one for polished pieces on technology (content management, web applications, content strategy, and so forth), and one about the rest of my life.

The categories look a bit lopsided, at least in terms of how specific they are. But, for better or worse, they reflect the distribution of my thoughts that could potentially be worth writing down. I spend all day thinking about technology (mostly web technology, but not always), and then I’ll often come home and work on some new idea for an app I have or help a friend with a website. But, I also have other interests and hobbies, and sometimes my output toward those are worth sharing too. However, the general DC tech public or python content management enthusiasts are likely just as interested in my photography as my little brother is on my meditations on RDF. So, I’ve relegated the technology writings (and maybe a little about epistemology) to m.odul.us, and my hobbies and other writings can live here. Expect to find

• About a minute of music, about every day
• Photography, and explanations of photography projects
• Meditations on aesthetics
• Responses to other blogs

But, who knows what else I’ll decide to write about — my hobbies vary a bit, and cycle in and out, and I maintain this mostly so I have URLs to point people at when I want to share something. And with that, it’s time to upload tonight’s minute of music.