Why I have finally decided to blog in my own name

 13th February, 2009

When I started blogging, in 2005 on a Saint-Tropez beach, I decided not to use my own name. I used an amusing pseudonym. I don’t believe this choice has any way hampered my style. But with the change in my life, interests and job that occurred last year, and also the decision to switch to English after three years of blogging in French, the time has come to draw the process to a logical conclusion and make this domain, donaldjenkins.com, my only home on the web. I’ve taken advantage of the move to improve the site design and simplify its structure: it basically now consists of just blog posts and a short About page1.

Keeping one’s web presence to a reasonable number of sites is essential to avoid dispersion. Flickr for photos, Twitter for ramblings, and Facebook for friends (please don’t add me unless I actually know you in real life) are the only ones you need to keep your friends in touch.

The one useful addition you might want to consider of top of those three basics is Google Reader: it’s an amazingly easy medium for those who like keeping tabs on web posts I have found interesting enough to bookmark. Anything else will basically be relegated to a link on the About page.

The RSS feed link remains unchanged and all the other links should redirect smoothly I hope. And I’ll be inaugurating the new site, from Oxford where I’ll be departing tomorrow, with a nice blog post about the fiftieth anniversary — or rather lack of it — of the French Culture Ministry.


  1. I stopped using a separate About page in 2017. ↩︎