One of the things that has kept me from blogging more over the years has been the problem of worrying that, or at least wondering if, the specific thing that is on my mind right now is particularly useful or interesting for my readers.

I find it sort of charming when people write “whole person” blogs that may contain material spanning from their personal emotions, to the culture they appreciate, to the work that they do, and the politics they believe in. But I also find it kind of irritating when I don’t happen to value or share in common one or more of those many disparate interests. Slogging through myriad posts about renaissance faires or meat rendering techniques, just to get the rare morsel about, say, optimizing Objective-C code, is not my idea of enjoying the written word as a reader of blogs.

And so I am very sensitive to try to keep things pertinent to the blog at hand. This has led to my having had for a long time now at least two, and often far more active blogs at a time. I started with just a single LiveJournal blog more than a decade ago, but when I started building Red Sweater it made sense to add a company blog as well. I pushed the limits of what is appropriate for a company blog, frequently using it as soapbox for my own personal beliefs, usually about tech issues, but occasionally straying into discussions about the environment, or endorsing a political candidate. I even eulogized my dad when he passed away four years ago.

I enjoyed a significant audience on the Red Sweater Blog, but I became increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that it was a personal blog more than a professional one. Sure, I announced all my product news, but also wrote about, well, almost anything I felt like. That didn’t seem right.

There was also a ton of stuff I didn’t write about at all. Stuff that wasn’t related to my business and furthermore wasn’t related to technology. For this, I kept an old “personal blog” at Blogspot, which was basically the evolution of my original LiveJournal blog. Here, for example, I wrote a long post on buying a car, sharing the tips I’d picked up in my own process of doing so.

But that personal blog wasn’t really suitable, or I didn’t think so anyway, for technical rants or programming advice. If I wanted to make broad observations about a tech company, or wanted to share advice about code signing, these didn’t really belong on either Red Sweater or my personal site.

So I’ve basically added blogs until I no longer hem and haw about whether or not to post something. There’s still a challenge sometimes in deciding which of my blogs to post to, but never a limitation of there not being a suitable outlet if I want it.

The only problem is that now whenever I post a new blog entry and share it on Twitter, somebody will have inevitably seen the blog for the first time and ask “how many blogs do you, anyway”

Let’s see if I can enumerate them all, as well as my rough idea of the audience they serve and the correlated limitations on content.

• Red Sweater Blog. My official company blog serves to inform existing users about updates to my software in a casual way that includes more verbose explanation about the changes than a mere bullet list of changes. The blog also, at its best, will share tips and tricks about using not only my software but software that is highly pertinent to Mac and iOS users as a whole.
• Bitsplitting. This is my technical soapbox. If something feels technical in nature but is not clearly tied to my work at Red Sweater in such a way that it’s meaningful to Red Sweater customers, then it goes here. I find this particularly liberating because it gives me a chance to share opinions about tech companies and people that might be less appropriate coming from an official company blog.
• Indie Stack. Some of my best posts on the Red Sweater Blog were long excursions into the process of debugging or programming for the Mac and iOS. Granted, some normal people found these posts interesting, but for the most part they fly right over the heads of those who are tuning in to learn about either my products or my philosophies about technology. Indie Stack is the nerd haven where anything goes so long as it’s suitable to other developers or people who happen to be interested in developer technologies.
• Punk It Up. Often neglected for long periods of time, this is where my non-technical writing belongs. Observations about social situations, jokes, advice about buying cars, etc. If it’s suitable for a general audience, it goes here. Wait, that’s not right, because this is also my blog for crude, relatively unedited quips on whatever subject. In short, these are my liberal arts writings, but they have also sometimes been uncensored. Perhaps that’s an opportunity for further bifurcation.

And unless I’m missing something, that’s how many blogs I have. Oh, but I forgot the podcasts and audio:

• Core Intuition. My weekly podcast with Manton Reece. We talk about anything related to being a Mac and iOS “indie” developer. Geared towards both developers and people who enjoy a peek inside the minds of two guys actively pursuing our indie ambitions.
• Bitsplitting Podcast. Spun off from the Bitsplitting blog, the idea with the podcast was to fill a void I perceived in other tech podcasts: a failure to dive deeper into the backstory of individuals being interviewed. The format for this show is a long-form interview that doesn’t hesitate to get philosophical about the life ambition of a guest, and how their stories have fulfilled that ambition thus far.
• TwitPOP. Born from my idea one day that (nearly) literal renditions of poetic tweets in musical form would be a good way to start doing something musical again, and to explore my fascination with the elegance of Twitter’s 140-character expressions.

You might wonder how a crazy person like myself manages to keep this many blogs going. I’m far from perfect, so of course there is some amount of neglect. I just posted to Punk It Up for the first time in four years, but it was nice to have it there when I finally got around to it.

But the other thing is this is only possible because MarsEdit makes editing a large number of distinct blogs somewhat sane. All of my blog posts and podcast episodes start in a familiar, Mac-based editor interface where all my favorite keyboard shortcuts, scripts, saved images, macros, etc., all live. Whether I’m writing to my company’s users or to the few people who take joy in my musical tweets, the interface for doing so is the same.

To be fair, there is certainly a cost to splitting everything up like this. Whatever notoriety I may gain with one blog is unlikely to transfer directly to the others. So if I wanted as many people as possible to see a specific post, it would have to go to the most visited blog, whether it was suitable content or not.

The compromise I’ve taken to address this problem is to treat Twitter as the over-arching, meta-topicked super-blog that acts as the umbrella to all the others. Regardless of the blog I post to, I’m likely to link to it from my @danielpunkass Twitter account. Sure, folks who follow me on Twitter may get tired of seeing links to various subjects that don’t interest them, but that is far less tedious to dig through than whole articles placed where they clearly don’t belong.

Now you know about all my blogs, and why they exist in such numbers. Just don’t ask how many Twitter accounts I have …