Why a blog?

Now that the crude design of this blog layout is complete, it’s time to populate it with a few snippets of information.

Yes, anecdotes after all.

While the main function of the original site was to collect and showcase the various jokes and virals one receives via email or stumbles across otherwise and indeed still do did form the main brunt of the content, this new layout allows us to categorise and compile the numerous personal projects and silly ideas we’ve had over the years.

And a blog lends itself beautifully to this purpose.

Hopefully a running commentary of life as seen and experienced by yours truly, it’ll be just one part of the puzzle that should form a greater picture over the next few years.

One past project, for instance, was the collecting of jokes. The site’s full of them, and they’re all over the place at the moment. While experimenting with the blogger.com format a few months ago, I ended up with five blogs — each based on a theme of some sort. Once the initial set-up and design layout was completed, each blog became nothing more than another email address in the ever-increasing audience of (text) joke recipients that was established (for a second round) in December 2000. Furthermore, these five (now abandoned but not largely deleted) blogs allowed me to determine the general themes of jokes that come my way and were worth keeping:

  • Battle of the sexes (Man vs. woman, Mars vs. Venus, husband vs. wife);
  • South Africa (a running gag of homesickness);
  • The Daft and the Beautiful (Celebrities, and the cerebrally disadvantaged);
  • Politics, Religion, and the Workplace (what a combination);
  • Other Jokes (everything else had to go somewhere).

The blogs didn’t last long, though.

Longer-lasting and marginally more successful were a couple of other off-sites, long orphaned and abandoned:

  • T-shirt battle: The battle of the sexes fought via t-shirt slogans;
  • Women Drivers: Unleashing the MCP in all of us;
  • What if they mated? — Based on a few loose .doc files;
  • Do you know Jack Schitt? Of course you do;
  • The worst album covers ever: Involving music, art and humour, this is most definitely going to spawn a permanent and maintained feature;
  • Party in the cat’s house: Actually, a very cute, clean and somewhat popular page — despite the often horribly mis-targeted Google ads;
  • A redneck’s first homepage: Also based on several loose .doc files (with a few personal touches added), this particular one turned out to be immensely notorious. In fact, if you did a Google image search for “skank” (with “safe-search” off), this site comes came out tops. Quite the dubious honour…

Now, to answer the original question: Why a blog?

Thoughts. Ideas. Concepts. That’s why.

And, while writing this retrospective post, we just about figured out the future design of this site (whenever that’s gonna happen), and that we’ve somewhat outgrown the music of Level 42.

Update 2015: Dead links removed.

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