A seven-year blogger reflects on growing, and changing, in public

I started BoWilliams.com in October 2006, really on a whim.  I was sitting in the living room, and had a thought like “oh yeah, I need to see about that blogging thing.”  Five minutes later, WmWms was born.

(That’s what my blog was called then.  It’s short for William Williams, you see.  Most people got it, but some significant percentage of people who ever had occasion to say my blog’s name out loud to me pronounced it, approximately, “woom wooms.”)

(That was my first indication that I might not have the winning name I thought I did.)

In any case, that’s a long time to be writing regularly and in one place.  As I type, BoWilliams.com has existed for most of 16% of my life.

“When you stop learning, you start dying,” the cliché goes.  I try to learn, and that means I change.  I do some things differently now than the way I did them more than six years ago.  Consequently, there are some things I wrote early on in this blog’s existence that I wouldn’t write today.

Partially, this manifests as what I regard as increasingly trivial vulgarity.  I used to say “fuck” a lot more, for example.  (I don’t have a blanket objection to that word, or any other word, today, but I think my threshold for its use is rather higher than it used to be.)  But I think differently on some issues, as well.  I’ll explore those tacks this way and that in posts to come in the near future.

I’ve been fretting a bit about that disparity.  I think probably I’ll address it with an addition to my About page, in the same spirit as this post.  This is a part of me that I’ve kept essentially continuously visible, and comparing pieces from 2006 and 2013 directly, with no allowance for growth, is not particularly revelatory.

I think the readers I’ve had for that long, and there are several and I thank you dearly, appreciate that.  I consider, however, that steady growth and thoughtful adjustment are things perhaps not particularly amenable to modern attention spans and/or cold search-generated arrivals, hence my thinking I need a few words on it on my About page.

Thank you for reading BoWilliams.com.

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2 thoughts on “A seven-year blogger reflects on growing, and changing, in public”

  1. Who would we be if we didn’t change as we age, Bo? We’d be adults stuck in teenaged minds. I’ve witnessed that, and it “ain’t” pretty. Our writings, thoughts, and tolerances change as we grow, thank goodness. I can’t begin to list the changes I’ve gone through, mostly by decade. I believe that is as it should be.

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  2. Bo, I can totally relate…my blog, which I created on a whim in 2003, has changed and evolved tremendously through the years. It’s currently on hiatus as I try and figure out where I want it to go from here…and if I want it to go anywhere at all.

    I had to laugh — I spent about five minutes trying to find a link to your ‘about.me’ page until I realized you meant your ‘about’ tab. I’m a born-blonde gal.

    By the way, I love TWD. I don’t know why. It totally blindsided me. I didn’t even really know anything about it until this year. My daughter begged me to at least just watch the pilot episode, so I did. Hook, line and sinker. A friend had the first two seasons on DVD, which I practically inhaled, and I went ahead and bought the third season on iTunes. *sigh*

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