Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Well, this post isn’t about excuses. This site is a personal, entirely egotistical venture on my part, and therefore I don’t really need excuses. Moreover, it would be silly of me to feel obligated to apologize to a handful of readers.

There are two relevant questions here. The first is: Why aren’t you writing as often as you’d like? The second is: If you’re not going to bother writing up posts on a regular basis, why go through the trouble of designing, registering, and paying for your own personal weblog? In short, if your laziness in updating the site causes you guilt, why bother keeping it around?

My generation can pretty comfortably call itself the Internet Generation, the one that first got comfortable with the slippery concept of an “online presence.” As a card carrying dork, I got my name on more web pages than most of the general populace, and I was always very comfortable with where and how my name showed up. Except for this one thing, one time, because of a stupid, amateurish mistake.

This website is an attempt to attach my name to things I can be proud of, and hopefully crush that one other thing down in the Google ranks. To accomplish this, my name needs to show up on this site very, very prominently, and that’s the whole problem. Were I just Jon22, I would be essentially anonymous, free to post about anything that crossed my mind, funny, offensive, or otherwise. But on this site I’m not Jon22, I’m Jonathan Dobres, a real person with a real reputation to think about. Sure, Heather Armstrong has no trouble writing about every embarrassing moment of her life for public amusement, but then, Ms. Armstrong isn’t seriously considering a future in academics. So sure, I want to write about lots of things, but then I wonder how this might be viewed by a potential employer five years from now, and it stops me.

Then, of course, I start to wonder if this one bad thing, the thing I’m trying so hard to squeeze off of Google, is worth all the effort. Would a potential employer, actually seeing this one thing, really take it seriously? In truth, I doubt it. It’d be trivially easy to explain it away in an interview.

Still, I do like to hear myself talk, so I’ll give this thing one more try, and see where it goes.