About This Blog (and a new one)

When I started this blog (Todd’s Thoughts), I didn’t really have a clear purpose. I wasn’t sure who my audience would be, and I wasn’t sure what subjects I would discuss. It’s been almost two years now and I think I’ve kinda figured it out. Though I still think the name is uncreative, it accurately reflects the content matter which covers many (but not all) subjects. I generally avoid politics, though I think much about them, and I tend to avoid making this a preaching pulpit. I also am not much interested in extended discussions in the comments section. I like comments because they show me that someone is reading, and this encourages me to continue. But in general I have little time or interest in discussions online.

I have also avoided promoting this blog. There are no links to it from my other websites, with the exception of one from my family website. A time or two when I wrote about BiblePlaces matters, I linked temporarily to this blog, but then moved the content so this blog wouldn’t be noticed by outsiders. Somewhere along the way, people started linking to me and now, I fear, there are readers whom I don’t know. When I realized this early on, I removed the link from this blog to my family webpage, trying to make it a bit harder to find for those I don’t know.

It’s all a bit of foolishness, I suppose, as by its very nature, the internet is public. So I’ve given up any pretense of this being a restricted blog. But I haven’t given up the notion that I’m talking to certain people, and not to the rest of the world. The world can listen, but I’m not necessarily talking to them here. It remains the situation that I am not trying to promote this blog to those I don’t know.

I have decided, for reasons that I can’t remember at the moment, to begin a BiblePlaces Blog. This will be a more public “announcement board” of things related to that subject. Some of the items that formerly would have been placed here will now go there instead. In fact, in order to create the blog “with the appearance of age,” I pulled various posts from the last few months over. This gave the benefit of demonstrating the nature of the blog to the BiblePlaces Newsletter recipients when it was announced (a blog with no posts wouldn’t make a very dramatic announcement). And indeed, I stumbled immediately after the announcement by going on a trip for a week and making no posts.

The point here, to readers of this blog, is that if you are interested in BiblePlaces matters, now you’ll have to look there. If you are solely interested in BiblePlaces matters, you can skip this blog and miss my often frivolous posts (yes, that is a main reason I started the BiblePlaces Blog; some readers care about that only and have to suffer through the rest and I am intending to spare them). If you read this for the more personal matters and don’t give a rip about biblical sites, then you’ll have fewer disappointments along this road. Some of you may have to look both places.

I don’t promise to not do things related to biblical sites here. In fact, that is a significant part of my “thoughts.” But they will be the more personal and less academic posts that make it here, like this week’s photo of Beth Shean.

I expect my blogging pace to remain the same as before, though now split between two blogs. Thus I’ll aim for not more than one post a day, either here or there.