What is it OK to blog about?

I had always intended to use this blog as day-to-day record of what it’s like being a PhD student. Unfortunately this proved to be unsuccessful. I never even got round to giving it a sensible title.

Most of the posts I found myself writing were about silly mistakes that I made in the laboratory. Sometimes these mistakes were pretty funny and I thought it could help people by sharing them. But then I had a crisis of confidence: do I really want to admit to the world that sometimes I am completely and utterly stupid?

On a similar vein, I have quite a wacky sense of humour and sometimes I like to write about really silly subjects (see: the iguana post). Writing in a more light-hearted way was a welcome relief from serious science, but I worried that I wouldn’t be taken seriously by being quite oddball on my blog. I think I would be really embarrassed if someone who didn’t realise how nutty I am really came across my blog.

Sometimes I found myself writing about what I was working on and wondered about how much detail it’s safe to go in to prior to publication. Another issue is that I am quite private with my online identity and struggled with how wise it would be to put my name and face to what I was writing.

I would be interested to get feedback on what I’ve written, so please feel free to leave a comment.