Ten years ago, I started writing a scientific blog about vertebrate paleontology. I had just started graduate school after a 5 year hiatus working at the American Museum of Natural History. As a new PhD student at the University of Colorado’s geology department, I wanted to keep improving my writing skills, as well as keep current on scientific discoveries in the field of vertebrate paleontology. My posts were mostly just a paragraph, summarizing the most current paper I had read. I would write first thing in the morning, with my coffee. It was not much of a blog. In 2008, the free server space I had enjoyed at the university was shut down, and I had to move my blog to Google’s blogspot. (A free site for blogging.) At the same time I was in the endgame with my dissertation writing and research, and keeping a blog seemed a luxuriate waste of precious time. After my graduation, I got a job outside of academia, and keeping a blog became even more irreverent for me. In 2011, I got an academic job, and with it a lot more responsibility. I toyed with continuing my blog as a weekly podcast, and thought about recording mini-lectures with a microphone. This train of thought led me to start posting videos onto Youtube and the creation of my vblog (video blog) Bestiapilosus “the Hairy Beast.” While I will continue to post to my vblog, I also thought about resurrecting my writing blog from the electric dust pin of the internet, and start writing on my new website (redesigned for 2014). Having now 10 years behind me, I realized that to keep a blog going is as much about creating the time to write, but also writing about something worthwhile. I’ve come to enjoy many of the earlier bloggers that started around the same time, people like Brian Switek, Penny Higgins, ReBecca Hunt-Foster, and John Hawks. As well as professional writers that actively blog about science such as Carl Zimmer, Ed Yong, Virginia Hughes, Maria Popova, Andrew Alden, and Maria Konnikova. All of whom I’ve come to enjoy reading their works, and if my writings are a tenth of the talent of those writers than I have succeeded.

Instead of calling my writing a blog, I’ve chosen the more formal “Personal Essays” title on my website. In part, to claim that this site is no daily episodic log of my random thoughts, recipes, or pictures of what I ate last night, but a more concerted effort to write essays on topics of my own interests, in other words, a more professional site. Plus, blog just sounds like what you do after a long night of drinking into a toilet. “Personal Essays,” I like the sound of that, much more professional. My wife of course thinks it sounds pretentious. Time will tell, how many people will click onto my Personal Essays, and if you are reading this (and got this far on the page), then I must be on the right track.