Entry Redacted: Post-hoc quality control

It's time for some more meta-blogging, dear reader!

I write about some pretty mundane stuff on this website, but I'd like to think that most of it is packaged in a way that makes it worthwhile. When considering an entry, I first ask myself if I'd be interested in reading about it if it was written by someone I don't know.

I try to avoid blogging about work, or my personal life in general, but I find myself revisiting my long-term, long-distance relationship regularly. When I'm writing about idly passing a day on the couch watching movies and TV shows with my lady, what I'm interested in is the deconstruction of this act, and finding the value that's devoid of sentiment. More recently, when discussing the logical-absurdity of sentimental value, I shared a vignette that illustrated the shared cognitive dissonance between two otherwise-rational adults who struggled to part with an item of legal tender, because of an emotional attachment that had formed for odd reasons. That's a direct juxtaposition between sentimental and monetary value! That's compelling stuff! Well, it is to me anyhow.

I try to keep the 'dear diary' stuff to a minimum, and I know it does occasionally creep in when I'm failing to hit my (laughably small) 5-posts a month target as I try to explain myself to the hypothetical slighted-reader, but I'm trying to get out of that habit. A week ago, I posted a screengrab taken from Facebook of something that pissed me off. I made no attempt to make the post worthwhile, I just put it up there to vent my anger.

It's since been taken down, the first post I've ever deleted from this blog since I started almost four years ago. If I were to go back and critically examine every post I've done with today's criteria of 'worthwhileness', I'm sure I could excise an awful lot more, but that's all for the time being.

I'm curious to hear from the other bloggers who read this: how do you self-govern? Do you have a hypothetical reader in mind when writing?