An Introduction

So what’s the point of this blog? If you can answer that question successfully you’re doing better than me. For a while now I’ve been thinking about setting up a blog. I love writing, but Facebook is too ‘social focussed’ to host a regular update, and Twitter…well I’ve reached my 140 characters already. My college work and my illness have meant that I struggle to work on writing books like I did over the last 2 or 3 years, so having a blog lets me write when I’m up to it and have the time! I’m using WordPress because in my view it’s the most professional software out there, and it has a really functional iPhone app.

So after you’ve established why I’ve set up a blog, I guess your next question will be what are you going to be writing about? Anything. Literally. I have strong opinions, and this is where I’m going to write them. Right now, as I write, I imagine a lot of it will be my opinions on news stories, as that’s what interests me. But that won’t stop me talking about football, religion, iPhones, or even Barbie if that’s what I choose to talk about. They’ll usually be topics worthy of more than a paragraph, and less than a book.

Now as I said, I have strong opinions, and often they can be controversial. I’m not planning to say anything offensive, but sometimes things can be misconstrued, and if something is misconstrued then I’m truly sorry. That said, I want to trigger discussion on topics, and sometimes I’ll pick controversial topics, perhaps for example the Public Health minister’s suggestion that we should call people ‘fat’ rather than obese. Clearly these sorts of topics could divide opinion. That’s why comments are allowed – I want to provoke discussion. Comments will be moderated, but only blocked if they contain swear words, or clearly racist, sexist, or in other ways discriminatory remarks.

Just to be clear, all opinions in the main blog articles are my own (unless I clearly state otherwise). They’re not the opinion of my charity initiative (which you can read about on one of the pages), my church, my family, my friends or anyone else. As I said, not that there will be anything offensive in these pages, but say I comment on government policy, I want it to be clear it’s just my opinion.

Finally, any photos you see on this blog will be my own, unless clearly stated. The one exception to that is the photo which is the header to the blog. My little brother took that, and the full version seen with this article. On that note, I’m sorry if photos sometimes appear ‘huge’. That’s the way the iPhone app deals with them, I’ll aim to get online and edit them as soon as I can.

EDIT: These days I tend to create headline graphics for my blogs. These are usually based around images I’ve found online. I always use Google Image’s usage rights filter, to ensure I’m only using images that are labelled for reuse and modification. (Spring 2017)

Well I hope you enjoy reading. Don’t forget to subscribe, I hope you won’t be disappointed.

Chris

P.S. This article was also the first blog post, on 30th July 2010