I don’t post here very much, not because I don’t want to but because I’m busy with so much else. In addition to teaching and doing my own research (currently for a piece on Sexuality, Gender, and Taboo) I have three other active blogging projects:
- Lifehack.org: a personal productivity site where I write about studying and writing strategies in addition to general organization and productivity topics.
- Savage Minds: An anthropology group blog. I’m currently working on a series on academic publishing. I also post quite a bit on the relationship between anthropology and the State, as well as material drawing on my American Indian research.
- StepDadding: This is my newest project, a site dedicated to practical advice and personal experiences drawn from my life as a step-father of three.
I’ve been blogging for just over 7 years now, since just before the 2000 election, and on the web even longer, and a few good projects have fallen by the wayside:
- ThinkNaughty: This is the site I set up to collect notes and resources on my research on sexuality and gender in American society. The host went out of business without any notification, and the database was trapped (although I have a fairly up-to-date backup). I don’t know whether I’ll move the site to my current host or import the posts to this site.
- One Man’s Opinion: My original blog back in 2000, One Man’s Opinion was really active from about 2003 – 2005. Unfortunately, trouble with one host led to the loss of a great deal of content, and eventually the loss of the domain name when my renewal was messed up. All the posts I could recover were imported to this site.
- Being Better Students: I started this project as a way of helping my students by providing tips and tools to help them master their student lives. It was also lost when the hosts went out of business. Some of my posts here follow in the same tradition (search for “best practices for students”, and of course much of my writing at lifehack.org does what BBS did, only better.
- Jewish-American.com: My first site. I lost this domain, too; now it’s a link farm for Jewish personals sites. When I was studying Jewish-American immigration and labor activism as a graduate student, I set this site up as a) a repository for sources I had found and wanted to remember, and b) a project to test my then-fledgling web design and coding knowledge out with. It got some nice attention, and was written up in a syndicated column on the Jewish web, which was nice. I still have all the files, so maybe I’ll put it back up someday, although most of the links are probably dead by now.
For a while, I was posting weekly round-ups of my posts at lifehack.org; this got to be a hassle as my schedule got more and more full, and also as I began producing more types of content there. And, really, I started thinking about what this site was about, and that’s not really it; I’d like this site to be more about my academic work and about my personal thoughts, filling in some of the gap left when One Man’s Opinion disappeared. THat is, when I want to write a Foucauldian analysis of Matrix II or rant about some stupid thing Bill O’Reilly said, this is the place.
I still have a great deal of content to add to the portfolio section of this site, too. My goal is for this to be a as-complete-as-possible repository of my work and thought. Believe it or not, I use it a lot just to remember what I was thinking about some years ago on some topic.
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