First, even though this is a personal blog, I tend to refrain from posting personal thoughts and tend to only post things that I think other people may find useful… for instance posting about my family tree would be useful to others working on the same genealogical line, mentioning a tasty new iced coffee drink may be useful to others who like iced coffee, and offering free WP themes may be useful; whereas posting about my personal plans or thoughts may not be so useful.

And then that brings me to the second point:  reading personal thoughts is great if they are well written and offer something on a universal level, in other words, if they are of literary value.  But I seriously doubt that many of the thoughts I’ve contemplated posting are of much literary value… that would take more writing practice…

Writing practice… that’s another thing – I like Ray Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing approach to writing – which theorizes that it takes lots of practice writing to write things of literary stature.  It would be so easy for me to log in and post it here… but do I want a public place like this to be my practice area – probably not, talk about cluttering up a blog.  Also, I doubt that I want every single thought of mine floating through the interweb.

So what combination of thoughts and information makes a good personal blog?  That’s part of what I’ll be trying to figure out here, and hopefully I’ll be able to offer some useful information as well as some insightful thoughts.

Feel free to leave me your thoughts on the nature of the personal blog, as well.

In the past few weeks I’ve visited relatives and gathered a wealth of photos and information about my family (and I still have more people to contact and visit).  On top of that, I’ve spent many a late night researching details through Ancestry.com and through a lot of Googling.

So I wanted to have a public place to share all of this information and I figured, what better place than my own personal blog?  So stay tuned – I’m going to be figuring out how best to publish family trees with information on here and I’ll let you know how I go about it in case you’d like to do the same.