What shall I blog about?

Last week, when I moved my Notes from Underground blog from Blogger to WordPress, I wasn’t sure how to divide material between this one and that. I had previously decided according to which blogging software was most suitable for what I wanted to write, but now it is the same, so I thought I should divide it according to subject matter, and asked readers to help me by voting in polls here and here. Thanks very much to those who have done so, as it has helped me to decide.

Khanya blog readers wanted:

History   — 25%
Culture  — 21%
Missiology  — 17%
Theology/Literature — 12,5%

Notes from Underground readers wanted:

Politics — 29%
History — 23%
Culture — 17%
Personal/Literature — 12%

Well that’s a fairly clear division, except perhaps for History and Literature.

So in future I’ll use Khanya for more academic subjects, especially in Missiology and Theology and History (but I’ll continue the Tales from Dystopia series, which are more personal). Literature and book reviews of non-fiction will mainly be in Khanya too.

I’ll use Notes from Underground for comments on current political issues, reviews of popular fiction (such as whodunits) and personal reminiscences (like the Mirbane article). There will still be some overlap, of course, but Khanya will tend to be more academic and serious, Notes from Underground more light-hearted and ephemeral.

I also used to use Notes from Underground for quick ‘n dirty links to interesting blog posts, as Blogger was a more suitable platform for that. But Tumblr is even better suited to that, and so I’ll rather use my Tumblr mini-blog, Marginalia, for quick links.  In reviewing Notes from Underground to see which posts to keep and which to discard, I found many such links were broken, especially when bloggers had rather inconsiderately decided to delete their blogs. So here’s a plea to all bloggers: if you are going to stop blogging, just stop, and don’t delete your blog. Even if you don’t add to it, links to your older posts will still work, and thus won’t contribute to Internet entropy.

There are also still a lot of fairly serious articles on Notes from Underground, including some on the subjects that I’ll now mainly be writing about on Khanya. Here are some, mainly missiological, that I think might still be worth reading:

Evidence that demands a verdict? – Missiology, inculturation and modernity.
Tolerance – Has “tolerance” become a weasel word?
The Liberal Party of South Africa – an article that has been arbitrarily removed from two other web sites
The state should get out of the marriage business – marriage and other social and domestic partnerships
Spiritual Warfare — a group of us had a synchroblog on spiritual warfare
Rulers and authorities, territorial spirits, and spiritual warfare — church and state and other related issues
More thoughts on spiritual warfare — response to some of the posts in the synchroblog on spiritual warfare
St Constantine: scapegoat of the West — some Western missiologists and others really have it in for St Constantine, and blame him for just about every conceivable problem in the church
Consciousness of absurdity and the absurdity of consciousness — is there a ghost in the machine?
Psychedelic Christian Worship — a controversial church service in Durban, over 40 years ago

You can also find this list, and more, on the “About” page of Notes from Underground.