The Purpose of a Blog: A Medium for Essays and Self-Assessments

TODO: translate to Chinese

In the first post of this blog, I question and answer why having one. I am now further specifying the purpose of this blog.

Everything starts with my thoughts, which are recorded in my journal. My journal is in the form of a text file I’ve kept since 10th grade and the Notes application on my iPhone. I’ve also haphazardly wrote some thoughts on a few notebooks. Although I love writing on physical paper, carrying a bunch of notebooks is undesirable for nomadic travel. Perhaps, I could send them home every so often, but even that would require me to be at home to have access to them. The best way, I’ve found (which I haven’t done yet: I still use Notes) is to use a text editor application that can edit text files on dropbox. If that feels risky, one can always backup the dropbox file themselves every so often.

My journal serves two purposes: history and thoughts.

The blog, I feel, should consist of more organized, readable, thoughts, which I likely wrote during an active time in life, and which perhaps may be transformed into essays. And the history may be examined for self-assessment and inquiry.

The medium did not have to be a blog, but I’ve, over time, come to like Wordpress. There is even an application for it on the iPhone which is very good. For me, it must be digital, mostly because I have a nomadic life. I actually thought a Wikipedia would be best. Perhaps it is; I just never felt Wordpress was bad enough for me to change.

So, the purpose of this blog is to serve as a medium to write essays and to create a historical self-assessment, both for the sake of philosophical inquiry with myself.