Blogging returns!

I’m back!

And so is the blog. For a year. We’ll see after that.

The Boston Globe and the Boston.com website got divorced this spring, and the Globe got custody of me, which means that Miss Conduct doesn’t have a blog on Boston.com anymore. (My column still runs in the newspaper, both print and online.)

The thing about blogging is that it’s such an open-ended endeavor. Are you posting too much? Not enough? Being interestingly varied? Yet staying on topic? What’s the end goal of any blog, besides a large number of readers to be disappointed when the blogger quits? Which almost everyone who blogs does, sooner or later, unless they’re getting paid.

And when people quit blogging, they tend to abandon their blogs for long stretches of time first, or start re-running old material, or generally behaving not like people who are bringing it home to a triumphant conclusion, but people desperately trying to gun an engine intent on sputtering to its death. I’ve done it myself. I think if we’re ending our blogs like that, maybe we somehow didn’t start them right.

So here’s my new idea: I’m going to blog in this space until next June, when I’ll decide whether or not to keep going. I’d like to get picked up as a blogger by another publication by then, or find some other way of supporting the blog. If not, I’ll re-evaluate, but having an end date in mind will, I think, help keep me focused and energetic.

The blog’s new tagline will be, “The Art & Science of Social Behavior,” and that’s what it will be about: the intersection of the arts, the social sciences, and everyday life. I hope you’ll enjoy it, and read and comment often. Coming up this week:

- Do the right clothes and props make you better at your job?

- “Mad Men” explains everything about my other job

- Why your parents buy your kids too many presents

Also, today’s “Miss Conduct” column is online here—a threefer, this week—and you can catch up on past ones here, now without a paywall to worry about (here’s information on subscribing to the Globe). I hid a little Easter egg in the column for Monty Python fans.

Welcome back! We’re going to have fun.