The PoorBlog Manifesto (Dan version)

Get it? Manifesto? Manifest? The Sphere?

So, as a peruser of too many blogs through Google Reader, a few times I have found myself wondering about many of these more well-established blogs’ first posts. How does the author decide what to say? Do you just jump in and start writing whatever they want their blog to be about? Does that make it seem like you’ve been writing these things all along, and only one day decided to start sharing your thoughts with the rest of the world? Or, do you cop-out, and make some kind of introductory post? Does that get people more interested in what you’re going to share next?

Or, you might be a little bit pathetic, and might be lacking both original thoughts and creativity, and create a post about first posts. Unfortunately for you, I am both of these things, and, through process of elimination, this last choice seemed like the best idea. The worst part about it is, I can’t even think what more to write about first posts, so I’m going to have to move on to another topic now. Maybe there was another first post choice I hadn’t even considered when I started writing this: the stream of consciousness post. Clearly, we will have no editorial process.

So this blog is called PoorBlog. I’ll be honest here: we (Doug and I) went through several different blog names that we thought people could somehow relate to, but most of the free .wordpress.com ones were taken. Some failed possibilities were:

• PizzaBlog
• CouchBlog
• ToiletBlog
• PuppyBlog
• CarpetBlog (we almost got really creative and went with CarpetBlogger, but I wasn’t not sure I fully understood the term carpetbagger enough to go with this)
• CookieBlog

You get the picture. In a span of 5 minutes, Doug and I basically decided we wanted to start a blog, looked around the room for things to name it after, thought of things we both like that we could name it after, and then for some reason settled on PoorBlog.

So, will poverty and those things and feelings and images associated with it be a major part of this blog? No. I think I’ll probably write about some cheap food I find, because I get excited about that, but that’s more of a middle-class, not-really-poor kind of poverty. I guess maybe we should have gone with FrugalBlog. The truth is, I don’t think finances or the lack thereof will even be a major theme to posts here, so we’ll all have to just accept this name and move on.

To give you a little tempting taste of things that I think I’ll probably write about, here are some things that I like:

• Food
• The internet
• Complaining
• Angry Birds
• Living above or below my means, but never at just the level commensurate with my means
• My beard (the kind that grows on your face)

I have no idea what Doug plans to write. Probably some things about long hair, acting, sleeping in, and maybe, if we’re lucky, he’ll touch on frugality, of which I know he is a huge fan.

So, come along on this journey with us. We’ll probably lose interest in a few days, anyway, so you don’t even really have to commit that much time to it. I promise that posts won’t really get longer than this, so hopefully this is the worst and most painful experience you have reading our blog. I’m tired and have work in the morning, so I’ll leave it to Doug to pick up from here. Hopefully he has a better idea for an introductory post.