"Unless I Get Addicted..."

Those were the words with which I ended my post of May 1, in which I stated that I was creating this blog for work-related purposes only in order to check out the reliability of the website I was using, http://www.jottit.com/. I said in that post that once I had determined the reliability of the site that I would stop making posts unless I got addicted to keeping my own blog.

Well, apparently I'm addicted. I decided three things yesterday:

1) Jottit.com is a fairly stable site. I used it for 6 weeks, and though the site was occasionally down the first week I used it, I never had a problem with it again.

2) I want to continue to keep a blog. This was the decision that I wasn't expecting, but I've found that I enjoy jotting my random thoughts down here, and it doesn't take much time. At one point when I thought about keeping a blog I thought, "What could I possibly find to say?" but I'm finding that topics just kind of come to me each day. Rarely do I plan in advance to talk about a subject (The only exception being the "Microsoft is Making Me Dumber" post, which I thought about maybe a week before I posted it and waited for a day when I didn't have anything else to say). Each day Life sort of deals me a subject. So, for now, I'll keep writing.

3) Jottit.com isn't the site I want to use for a permanent blog. Don't get me wrong. It's a great site, and I'm going to continue to use it for other things and I'm going to recommend it to teachers to use with their classes. However, there were some features missing from Jottit that I felt I wanted to have on a permanent blog.

So if you're visiting the site today and you notice that it looks a little different, that's because I ported my entire blog to a new site, blogger.com. Everything that was on the old Sweasy.net blog is here, plus some new features:

• You can now leave a comment about posts made on the site. To do so, click on the link at the bottom of the blog entry that says "0 comments" or "1 comment" or whatever number it says. I currently have it set up so that anyone can comment without having to create a google account (Blogger is owned by google). Just post as "Anonymous." Keep in mind, though, that your post can be read by anyone on the Internet, so don't post personal things that you wouldn't want ANYONE to read.
• Posts are automatically archived. I had to do this myself before.
• There is a survey on the site now. Yes, you can complete a survey question. I'll change them from time to time.
• You can now email a link to a blog entry directly to someone just by clicking the little envelope at the bottom of each entry.

There are a lot of other features as well, features which I have not implemented but may in the future. But I guess that this means that I have--after about 10 years of resisting--entered the world of the "blogosphere" (just typing the word sort of makes me sick, but oh well).

Oh yeah, and blogger.com has a built in spell checker, too, so I can continue in my journey toward stupidity!