Mixing It Up

Here's the announcement:

I need a bit of a change. We started this blog (actually, its predecessor) four or five years ago as a way of sharing interesting articles we found on the web. It had become a pain to send out an email with a link everytime something took our fancy. The blog was a way of letting friends know what you were reading so that you didn't have to give background when discussing any number of topics.

We never cared much about numbers of readers, so we never compiled a giant blogroll and tried to get other people to put us on their blogroll. Every once in a while we would write something longer or more substantial, and when stuff became too long or too personal or too much about Cleveland sports and distracted from the rest of the blog, we put it on other sites like Big Tent Extra or Big Tent Pictures or Cleveland '64. In short, the main blog was a device for facilitating conversations about (mostly) important topics of the day.

Over the last two years, as the Big Tenters have spread across the country and gotten involved in their schooling or careers or both, the conversations have become monologues. It's not that one or two people are doing the majority of the posting, it's that we don't talk about the posts anymore. There are no more conversations. Hey, it happens.

At the same time, I've been finding that I am writing longer posts, whether I intend to or not. Also, I've long been toying around with the idea of making my blogging more personal, a bit more like a diary. That was the point of the post on Big Tent Extra I cryptically called "My Diary." Big Tent has been an excellent chronicle of what I've been reading, and, sometimes, what I've thought about it, but I'd like to record what's going on in my life in a bit more of a substantial way.

All that said, there's only so much time in the day--I have a full time job, and I have a growing family. I need to focus my energies a bit more.

What all this means is that I have started a new website (still under construction) that will include a diary blog that I will update two or three times a week. In effect, I am shamelessly stealing the idea of the Bleat, only I will feature more links and bad writing. The topics will be whatever gets me going, from politics and reading to personal stories and pictures and movies. Big Tent just isn't the right format for this type of personal writing.

My posting on Big Tent, if the guys are okay with it, will be limited primarily to linking to my diary blog, my writing on Cleveland '64, and anything else of mine that someone might be foolish enough to publish. It's time to mix it up a bit. You won't miss my links--just look up Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Steyn, and Jonah Goldberg and you'll be fine.

Thanks for reading. Here's the first entry on the diary blog.