For someone who has recently given up on having websites, I do seem to accumulating them at a tremendous rate. Not so long ago I was basically done with being on the Internet, burnt out by the Demon Pigeon thing and not really wanting to write anything other than the novel. I was in a new job and that was stressing me out, but more importantly I was feeling pretty down about my own writing. I needed a break. I was also sick of paying hosting fees, url renewal charges and everything else. So I closed Demon Pigeon, closed the old self hosted version of this blog and genuinely thought that was me done with the internet.
Except I couldn’t just consign all that hard work to the dust. I’d been blogging for over a decade, over which my life had changed dramatically. I’d gone through numerous career changes, started a family and stopped the crazy party lifestyle completely, and the blog was in some ways a document of that time. I had to back it up somewhere, just as an archive. Demon Pigeon too wasn’t just my thing, it had the work of nearly a dozen other writers, and a lot of stuff that I was personally pretty proud of. So I had to back that up too.
I knew I had a WordPress account kicking about, and since I’d always used WordPress as a base for both blogs, it made sense to just copy them both over to that. So I did that, closed the other ones down and hey presto, I was done with the internet. Farewell to all that.
Except then I had an idea to start a Spotify playlist exchange site. A few others seemed to like it, so I set up a third website, Tapetraders. Messing around with that a bit I found myself coming back to this site, and then suddenly I was blogging again. Tapetraders hasn’t really had the necessary input put into it so it’s kind of gone quiet over there, but it’s a good idea and I keep meaning to go back to it. But blogging again seems to have really taken root, for some reason. I’ve not got a lot to say but I like to say it. The justification I use is that it keeps my other writing, the proper stuff, sharp. I guess that’s true, but there’s more to it than that. I just like blogging. I’m a blogger.
Which is probably how I’ve ended up with another website. One of the long running things I was doing at Demon Pigeon was a faintly ludicrous challenge to try and listen to every album on Rolling Stone magazine’s top 500 albums of all-time list. Actually, that fudges the genesis of the whole thing a bit. It started here on Blog on the Motorway as a bit of fun, but my co-editor at Demon Pigeon suggested I should move it over, so I did. With his help we turned it into a more focused project, and it ended up being pretty much the most popular thing I did for the site (not a hard accolade to achieve).
I only made it as far as 300 on the list (working backwards from 500) by the time we closed it, and I was gutted that I hadn’t finished it. It was a fun project to do, opened my ears to a hell of a lot of music I’d never listened to, and writing about the dreadful ones was fun enough to make having to listen to them worthwhile.
After a few months of letting the dust settle on Demon Pigeon, I thought about trying to make my way through the remainder of the list, and found myself idly setting up my fourth free wordpress blog. If you’re sitting there thinking to yourself ‘for pity’s sake have I just read all of that just for him to pimp out his new blog’ then, well, yes, you have. The first new entry in the Rolling Stone 500 challenge went live on Friday.
So much for quitting blogging though, eh?
