Yup, it’s time to talk about myself and the blog again.
It was announced this past week that the company I work for has been sold to another. The particulars aren’t important–these things tend to unfold similarly from company to company.
When two organizations merge, there’s an adjustment period as management is rearranged, priorities are reevaluated, and a future course for the combined organization is plotted. Almost inevitably, personnel redundancies will be found, and positions eliminated. None of that has happened yet, but it would be quite unusual if it doesn’t happen in the next few months. The adjustment period tends to be 90 days if not shorter. Redundancies are usually cut all at once–a clean break, as it were.
When I told my friends, many of them believed I had nothing to worry about, that my skills are obvious and that I am clearly important to the company. Of course, I know better! It’s not a question of who is indispensable or who has the best skills. Regardless of what my skills are and what value I may have brought to the company, those making the decisions may not be aware of any of that, or it may not matter in their calculations. I had assumed I was safe at my previous employer, back in 2008, but when the ax fell, I was one of the castoffs. These things happen.
But to focus on the positive, I’ve already updated my resume, which I’d last worked on about a year ago. I had some new items to add. I also went back and removed some of the less impressive bullet points. In fact, I need to find ways to make it shorter, because it’s currently over two pages. It’s good to be in a position where I have too much on my resume and can thus afford to trim it back.
That doesn’t have much to do directly with this blog, except that if I become jobless, it may affect the quality of posts here. In which direction, I can’t say. I’d certainly have more time to work on it, but I might be stressed from the lack of employment. I would enjoy being able to do this full-time, and put the amount of research and care into each post that they deserve, but realistically, I know what kind of money bloggers tend to make, and I just can’t get by on a pittance. I have children and other obligations, so this can only be a part-time activity.
I’ve been thinking more and more about changing other aspects of the blog, though. I have a feeling a lot of the content here is not very “discoverable.” I have over 200 posts, but being able to find a post about something in particular is probably not that easy. I’ve been investigating some “related posts” plugins, and I may use one or more of those to help people explore. The “popular posts” sidebar seems to be doing its job–people click it! That makes me happy. I’m also getting a fair amount of organic traffic from search engines. I’ve never paid for ads anywhere, and I don’t intend to anytime soon. Nor do I accept ads or consideration for this blog. I will post links that are sent to me, as long as I think they are in some way worthwhile, but it’s only if I want to–not because someone is willing to pay for it. That is not something I would expect to change, either.
I’m debating whether I should write more or less about political topics in the near future. The election is almost exactly half a year away–26 weeks. That’s plenty of time to say a lot about it. It is, perhaps, too much time. I should be able to pace myself and cover anything important without it taking over the blog. I would anticipate maybe one or two posts about the Presidential election per week, but it could well be less. With the primaries effectively over, it’s time for the presumptive nominees to lay out their platforms and compete with one another. There will be debates, attack ads, the works. It’s still appalling that Donald Trump gets to be the nominee of a major political party, but what can you do? The best hope is that he loses–badly. The electoral map today is such that a 48-state blowout isn’t plausible, but improving on Obama’s 2012 victory may not be out of the question. This is something I’ll probably write a post about this week.
In any case, I haven’t made any obvious changes to the site this past week, so you shouldn’t have noticed any. I do seem to have a bug or two eating portions of posts (mostly the link roundups), and I’ll have to see what I can do about that. Otherwise, I have to go back and fix things after posting, which is a pain. I’ll post an update if it happens to come up again.
Have a great week!
