I’ve done a lot of writing today. Most of it has been for mailing lists, and nothing seems to fit for the blog. Other stuff that I’ve written will make a good blog post when I have some time to sit and think and pull it all together. Yet other than an automated post from ma.gnolia, I haven’t written anything for the blog today, and I feel compelled to do so.

Both yesterday and today, I wrote some long detailed personal emails that I was fairly pleased with. They required some serious thought and good wordcrafting. It felt good to write that way, and I’ve been thinking about my posts on the blog recently. Some of them have caused me to think as I put my words together, but a lot of them have been pretty light.

To a certain extent, that is okay. If I was having serious, weighty discussions all the time, I’d probably be even more boring. Yet I like to engage in serious discourse when I can.

I’ve also been speaking with the folks at sezWho, trying to get their post and comment rating system working more reliably on Drupal. They seem to have fixed most of the problems, although there are a few outstanding minor problems.

With that, I’m starting to get people to rate my blog posts. My welcome blog post has received six ratings, for an overall rating of 4.0. There really isn’t much of anything in the blog post, and perhaps people are using it to rate the blog overall. My most recent Wordless Wednesday post also received six ratings with an overall rating of 3.8. It was a picture of a German Chocolate cake that Fiona and I made for Kim for her birthday. As is common with Wordless Wednesday posts it received a fair amount of comments as well.

Yet my more serious post, the day before about discussions of the nature of authority on a mailing list that I’m on, received three ratings, for an overall score of 2.3. It received one comment, which didn’t really address the main theme of the post. Yet this post stimulated great discussions on two different mailing lists. I wish people who disagreed with what I wrote would leave comments about what they disagreed with, instead of simply giving it a poor rating. I also wish that sezWho would make it easy to see who has given which ratings, and what other posts they’ve rated. Without this, the ratings seem arbitrary and don’t really help to build either community or help further the discourse. I’ve suggested this to the folks at sezWho and we’ll see if this comes in a future release.

So, I sat down, I didn’t have a clear direction of where I wanted to go with today’s blog post, but, in order to stay with at least a post a day, I managed to crank out something. I hope it was interesting and/or informative. For me, the discipline of forcing myself to post every day, has been beneficial, and I think I’m improving as a writer because of it.

What do you think? What should the balance of light and serious posts be? How do we build community and discourse around our blogs? Do you have goals or other things that help you write regularly, or improve your writing?