A Blog By Any Other Name

It is day two of my journey to blog perfection as I reinvent James Proclaims with the help of WordPress course Blogging 101. I’m now wondering if I may, in fact, have bitten off more than I can chew. There’s three weeks of this in total. I’m no expert, but if I just blog about blogging for three weeks I’m going to alienate all of my existing readers rather than attract new followers. Plus I’d much rather be writing about important stuff like my collection of novelty eggcups or my yearning memories of eighties cartoons.

On the other hand I’ve started now and I don’t want to look like a quitter…

Today’s assignment, delivered by the Email Fairy promptly this morning, is as follows:

Edit your title and tagline

Well obviously I’m not actually going to do that. As I’ve already stated very clearly in my ‘About’ page. James Proclaims is a great name for a blog, especially if the person writing it is called James (which I am). Because there’s a rhyme. And rhymes are awesome!

I had genuinely been tempted to call it ‘James Explains’, like my regular column in a now long departed university newsletter.  ‘James Explains’ was summed up by a fellow student, not exactly a friend, for he was the kind of over-privileged oaf that would not have been out of place in the Bullingdon Club, if he’d been good enough to actually get into Oxford. Which like me, he wasn’t. After my first column was published, he walked up to me and, with a sneer, announced that despite my column being entitled ‘James Explains’ “it didn’t explain a damn thing. In fact it was just banal.”

High praise indeed. Other people missed the point of the column entirely; saying ridiculous things like it was ‘really funny’, and it ‘made them laugh’. One of my lecturers even accused it of being ‘very good’. But he was fond of a glass or two of red wine…

Skip forward a number of years and the creation of this blog, and while I wanted to recapture the banal spirit of James Explains, it did feel like this was a new project and thus deserved a new name. Plus James Explains doesn’t rhyme and that had become a bit of a deal-breaker…

Of course I could have called the blog James Exclaims, but the URL would have been jamesexclaims.com, which people might read as Jame Sex Claims. And while that would no doubt generate a great deal more traffic, it really would be a different kind of online journal…

Anyway, I’m not going to change the title of this blog. James Proclaims will continue as is.

I’m not changing the tagline either. I’m immovable on this.

Unless I can think of a better one.