Work-blog balance

When you get a number of friends emailing to find out if you're okay because you haven't blogged for a couple of weeks it's maybe time to start paying the old thing some attention again. Although I do have a subscription to one of these blog stats packages and I keep an eye on it, I never seem to be getting as many hits as many younger blogs report in their early days. So I do often wonder if it's worth it all sometimes.

But yesterday I was on the platform for a debate/discussion on the subject of "Planning to win?" at the Lib Dems' South Central Regional Conference held here at Oxford Brookes University and the chair of the session had clearly got most of her information about me from this blog, so I guess it does get noticed once in a while.

But you know how it goes, it's not that I've not had any opinions over the past couple of weeks; far from it, I seem to have unfinished blog posts on a dozen different topics. But with being the only one in at work for much of last week and having had evening meetings on every night I wasn't on duty (and one on one that I was on duty for!) everything else gets behind a little. And soon my RSS feed reader is showing upwards of four thousand unread items and it all gets a bit much.

Some other projects must come ahead in my priorities over blogging; projects that promise in more practical ways to get across my core ideals:

• Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts where I've had two meetings in the past week explaining how to create community led affordable housing in two rural communities
• the "Liberal ALTERnative" book project aiming to get a book on radical liberal economics out before the autumn conference season
• the Oxfordshire Social Enterprise Forum's replacement website which we hope will better support and help grow the social enterprise sector in Oxfordshire
• and most of all, the run up to election campaigning for a seat on Oxford City Council again in May - where I think our agent would get upset if I blogged all my spare time while telling him I didn't have much of that precious commodity for campaigning!

Add to that obligations such as being the staff side elected governor here at Brookes, and we've had a few board and committee meetings in the past couple of weeks and you'll maybe see why I haven't got round to blogging much. I'm also still not really happy with the design, not happy that it actually has the effect I want of being simple but of steering readers to related posts and links and getting them to stick around a bit more to read the "back issues". But I'll live with the design while I cannot carve out any more time to work on it!

So, it might still be "blogging lite" for a while, but I will try and better choose my subjects so I don't end up writing nothing as a result of having too much to write about!