Why ‘write on/write off’?When starting this blog I felt it needed a name to hint at its contents. My options seemed clear:

• think of something that expounded upon my name. The best example to me is the very clever mashing of author and object - Bloug! (the blog of Louis Rosenfield, one of the founders of the Information Architecture movement)
• think of something that expounded upon my personality. There are many good examples around - Jenny at The Shifted Librarian, Christina’s Elegant Hack - how about Dan and Didier’s Superfluous Banter? (which of course, isn’t)
• think of something that didn’t expound, but just sounded damn cool - Blogaritavilla fits the bill there.

Only there was a slight problem:

• The name: I couldn’t find anything neat about my name. “Rachel Maureen” translates to “Bitter Mary”, and I’d like to think not all my entries were going to be bitter. The closest thing I could think of was the similarity between the name “Rachel” and the word “bachelor” - but then you’d get a meaningless, vaguely post-structuralist sounding strange name. I could just see the confusion in the user’s mind - “‘Rachelor?” “Rachel/or”? “Rachel’s a bachelor - wait, I thought she was a girl”?
• The personality: I couldn’t find anything neat about my personality that I could shrink down to a neat, pithy statement - anything that would set me apart from a whole generation of intelligent young members of the digerati. I have attributes I can choose from or puns I can create, but I’ve never been one for the restrictions of 50 words or less type descriptions, except for metadata. Alas, some of the best ones had already been created (heck, someone had even taken What Do I Know).

So - why the name I’ve chosen? There are a number of explanations - take your pick:

• the medium: I’m a fan of whiteboards. In meetings I’m always suggesting people use them, and I find myself using them - for work, for home, as a dream journal, you name it. When I came across a most excellent (i.e. usable, affordable) portable whiteboard system I started thinking that what one does with whiteboards - the action of writing on and wiping off - might serve as a metaphor for the blogging experience. We post an entry (”write on”) and delete them or they become archived (”write off”). They can become as permanent as the author decides to make them.
• the process of building: finishing up this redesign I named two of the images ‘write_on.gif’ and ‘write_off.gif’ in keeping with the modified 5 w’s approach to the navigation (welcome, who, work, whatnot, write) of my site. I knew that proved useful at some point.
• the critic: Whenever I come across things that work - or don’t work - I compulsively have to share it with others. Heck, isn’t that what blogging is, in part, about? This will be a place to celebrate all that works - the “right on’s” so to speak - and what doesn’t work - the “write-offs” in my life - be it design related or non-design related. But this isn’t just about my life…which reminds me of:
• the interactivity of it all: What makes blogs so interesting is the opportunity for the author to interact with the reader (one wonder what Marshall McLuhan would have to say about the hazards of that). So a blog gives you, the reader, the chance to ‘write on’ about what you think about a chosen entry. If you choose to ‘write off’ - that is, stay silent, then so be it; if you take the opportunity to ‘write on’ and interact, then you can benefit from the dialogue. Books (and any medium of information) need to be critically engaged with to fully benefit from the experience - that means wrestling with the contents through deliberation, discussion and debate. That’s the strength of this medium, and why I want you to write on.

So that’s the name. Nothing more, nothing less. Write on, MacDuff, write on.  There’s an archive of my Blogger posts over at Blogger; eventually I’ll migrate all the contents over here to WordPress.  Until then, enjoy your stay.