Blog Cascade

My husband made a very good point earlier today that has had me breaking out the note-cards and playing around with possibilities. He mentioned that he thought it would make more sense if I just combined everything into one blog instead of splitting things out into separate blogs.

Having one blog would mean less logging in and out of the various WordPress Dashboards. Less password and username forgetfulness. Less fiddling with the nine thousand email addresses. Less addon and theme updates to install. Less backups to store. Less tracking tools to manage. Basically, less headaches in general.

It would allow me to have one website, one email address, and one core identity online, instead of the rather fractured one I have now.

Hobby Disconnect

Originally I had split out my blogs because my interests/hobbies/topics have very little overlap (Model Horses vs World of Warcraft). I did the same thing on my LiveJournal with filters, but I’m serious thinking of declaring a do-over in both locations. Simplification is a key focus in my life at the moment and it’s interesting to consider what the negatives would be from falling back into a ‘all Martha, all the time’ setting.

The main negative I can think of would be a lack of focus, since the topics do have very little overlap. A loss of focus might mean a loss of readers, but I have very little traffic to the various blogs that doesn’t come in through a search engine to start with. Those few places that do link to the old pages can be handled with a simple redirect setup with my hosting provider.

(Speaking of which, I’ll have to reset all of the Google analytics and AdSense settings, and make sure the redirection and reposting doesn’t get me blacklisted by accident (eek!).)

Comics Sans Away!

Another negative would be a loss of the visual distinctiveness that each blog currently has. The only website that really requires a separate WordPress theme is the comic strip (Camera Angles), so although they all have very different looks there isn’t anything forcing the differentiation. Having them separated is nice, but I’m not sure if the trade-off is worth it in the time an energy it takes me to maintain them all.

Something that’s not so much a negative as a massive undertaking would be having to sort out the best way to reorganize the Categories and Tags, but I didn’t put much thought into them to start with, so I suppose it couldn’t hurt to sit down and plan things out for once.

I’ll be poking about in the settings and trying out some ideas, so don’t panic if things look a little different (i.e. ‘broken’)… I’m just experimenting.