It’s been a crazy few months of work, as balancing my Equinox and Composite obligations has made my schedule more than a bit nuts. And, it appears, this blog was one of the many things that got back-burnered as a result.

Still, as I’ve learned over the years, you can reboot a habit as easily as you fell off it – you just do it again once, and then the next day you do it again, and slowly you accumulate enough days (ideally even sort of in a row) that it once again becomes second nature.

To that end, one day down, and hopefully a bunch more to come.

Starting a month or so ago, a handful of eagle-eyed readers mentioned that some older links on this site were redirecting to the now long-defunct self-aggrandizement.com domain.  I assumed that was just due to laziness on my part – I’d fallen off of daily blogging, and hadn’t updated the design or code of this site for years and years, so I figured there were likely hard-coded links, or misconfigured files, or something to that effect that was hosing those entries.

Turns out, it was nothing so benign.  Instead, the German spammers who had bought the old domain name, and who had set it up as a link farm, had somehow used that domain to hack into the server hosting this site.  And, slowly and surreptitiously, they were putting in 301 redirects – hundreds and hundreds of them – to automatically forward my traffic their way.

As they apparently started from the oldest pages, I only discovered as much myself when I tried to add a post, went to see that it had gone up correctly, and instead ended up reading about “Tipps zur Anwendung von Pheromonen.”

Fortunately, after a brief stretch of sheer panick, I managed to get the underlying issue resolved with Bluehost, the super nice hosting company that I use. Getting everything working again, however, took about a week. Which leads me to right now.

At this point, I believe all should again be well on this site. If not, definitely let me know. Fortuitously, I had already been intending to get back to blogging much more regularly and informally anyway, so this seems like as good a cue as any.

Back to it!

"We found in all of our research studies that the signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change; the signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency."
-Jim Collins, Great by Choice

In the past decade, I’ve heard an array of credible people – from Freakonomics’ author Stephen Dubner, to CrossFit founder Greg Glassman – all observe that the secret to building a large audience online is a simple trifecta: quality, focus, consistency.  Hit all three, and an audience will follow.

This past weekend, I ended up looking at my traffic logs for this site.  And, on the one hand, given the rather large Google-able library of content I’ve built over fifteen years, there are still waaaay more people who show up here than probably should.  On the other, that’s just a small fraction of the readership this site once had, at my blogging peak.

So, assuming that I’m going to keep blogging, and that I probably want people to read the blog if I do, it might be time for me to consider that quality / focus / consistency trifecta.

As for quality: well, this is pretty much how I write.  Sure, I can spend more time editing and re-writing before posting, can focus on mixing more of the highly-considered longform pieces in with the hopefully-interesting-yet-still-brief pops.  But this site always has been and always will be my outboard brain: a place where I scribble down ideas, observations, stories, and reflections in the kinds of long, convoluted sentences that give the Hemingway Editor conniption fits. What you already see, in other words, is what you’re going to get.

Focus, though; that one’s a choice. Indeed, I regularly hear from people who are interested in just one of the many topics I’ve posted about regularly in the past – whether fitness, tech, productivity, or drunken misadventure – and wish I’d scrap the rest in favor of more about the single topic they find interesting. But, again, this site is first and foremost my outboard brain. And since my actual brain is full of all those topics and countless more, I’m just not that interested in winnowing down, regardless of whether doing so would be a smart content marketing strategy.

So onto consistency! That’s one where I’m both totally shitting the bed at the moment, and also know I could be doing better. For many years, I managed to blog more or less daily. And, not surprisingly, that’s also when this site had a far more substantial and engaged following. In the past year, however, my blogging has been entirely feast and famine – short stretches when I get back to it with alacrity, followed by a fall off the blogging wagon that leads to long stretches of radio silence.

Funny enough, that’s the same pattern I also see in people following and then falling off of diets. So, perhaps, the same prescription applies:

First, start thinking about a day (or three) of misses as inevitable aspects of growth rather than as signs of absolute failure. Based on past experience, I’m sure I’m going to fail at blogging for days at a time. That feels less like ‘game over’ if I’m already expecting it to be part of the process.

Second, especially when coming back from a derail, stop making the perfect the enemy of the good. When people are working on nutrition, they’ll often eat a single less-than-perfect meal (say a couple of slices of birthday cake at work on Thursday) and turn that into an excuse to binge on Ben & Jerry’s all weekend until they can ‘start fresh’ the following Monday. I’ve totally been guilty of that here, with a short absence turning into an ever longer one as I start to think I need to write a crazy long post (like this one, apparently) just to justify the disappearance and return.

Which then leads to a third and final point: the solution to perfectionism is a celebration of incremental gains. Something is better than nothing. Which means, in nutrition, a willingness to pat yourself on the back if today’s eating was even just slightly better than yesterday’s. And, in blogging, probably means I should be putting up more short, shitty posts if that’s what it takes to keep blogging on the (somewhat) daily. Apparently, look for more those to come!

I remember, back in the late '90s, seeing my friend Miles' "weblog." It was a collection of lightly-annotated links to odds and ends around the web that he had found interesting – in other words, it was literally his log of the web.

At that time, before Google and Facebook and Twitter, before endless online publications curating and aggregating, it seemed an invaluable resource, a way to find the fun and interesting and new that I'd otherwise have completely missed. After Miles', I sought out a handful of other interesting weblogs, and returned to them regularly over the weeks and months that followed.

In the two decades since, 'weblog' was elided to 'blog,' and mashed up with the sort of online journaling that appeared in Livejournal, to produce platforms like Blogger and MovableType, the progenitors of what we now think of as blogging. This site, indeed, is closer to the now-used meaning: as Wikipedia puts it, "a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries ("posts"), typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page."

But, for the first decade of this site, I also kept a second, mini-blog in the right sidebar, one which hewed closer to the original meaning of the term. It was simply a collection of what I was watching, reading, enjoying, or pondering elsewhere on the web, linked directly with a bit of description or commentary.

I called that side-blog Salmagundi, an English word that stems from the French 'salmigondis', and means "a disparate assembly of things, ideas or people, forming an incoherent whole."

Five years ago, with Twitter growing fast (and still, at that time, only about a tenth the size that it is today), I decided to shift platforms, to ditch Salmagundi in favor of simply tweeting that kind of content instead.

And, indeed, though I've been intermittent at best in my tweets, I quickly picked up a (perhaps undeservedly) sizable audience there.

But, in the more recent past, as I've continued to follow a handful of old-style weblogs (like the great sidebar at Waxy.org), I've also started to think about the differences between Tweeting and side-blogging.

Tweets are hugely ephemeral; I almost never read back through individual users' profiles, so if I don't happen to see something when it floats down my Twitter stream, it's gone for good. Whereas, with a link-blog, even if I haven't been to the site for several weeks, I still find myself scrolling through everything that's been posted in the intervening time. Those weblogs feel to me more like, well, logs, archival indices that point to the enduringly interesting and good. They still feel, at least to me, like they’re worthwhile, even in our Twitter-ified world.

So, as of today, I’m relaunching Salmagundi over on the right-hand side of this site. The look and feel may continue to evolve a bit, and I apologize in advance if the update has broken anything for you – it turns out my PHP and CSS coding skills didn’t somehow improve on their own after a decade-and-a-half of disuse. Hopefully, you’ll find at least some of what I post as intriguing as I do. (And, if not, the site’s free; you get what you pay for.)

Apologies for the radio silence here, but I’ve been blogging pseudonymously elsewhere, and banking future blog posts for a shortly-launching business site, and it appears I only have so many words per day in my brain. Trying to get this blog back into the rotation.

Sorry for the radio silence. Helping launch the NPFL has eaten waaay more of my time than expected. In parallel, Dobbin’s counting down to the launch of the Spring ’14 line, and CrossFit NYC is taking over two more floors of our 28th St location. Plus I’m neck-deep in a bunch of structural / fund management stuff at Outlier, which should help us better keep up with and support our portfolio companies, and am trying to help my brother wrangle a brand new puppy (his first dog, as Gem is mine).

In short, not much time for blogging. Though I am strongly considering stopping sleeping and going to the bathroom, which would definitely free me up a bit. Either way, hoping to get more up here, more regularly, soon.