The idea was to start the blog, build a bit of a readership, immerse myself in the travel writing world, and improve my writing. One day, I reasoned, I might want to write a travelogue of my own, which would focus on my quest to visit various places that played key roles in the history of public land protection in America.

Of course, the best laid plans, right? While I snagged up a few domains, continued stockpiling writing ideas, subscribed to a ton of travel blogs and sought out travel and national park related social media opportunities on Twitter, I’ve yet to write a single freaking post.

Most of that is certainly due to a lack of time and energy – things have been very busy recently, and it doesn’t seem like the right time to try to squeeze something else into the mix. But that’s not all of the reason. I like planning things out, making sure I have done the required homework, and not necessarily one to jump in without giving something a thought. Since I haven’t had time to commit to spending any money getting the blog designed, nor have I had the time to fumble through doing it myself, I’ve procrastinated on doing the most important thing you need to do to have a successful blog – write something compelling, interesting, and useful. Instead, I’m concerned that I haven’t learned the art of Google AdSense, or am wondering which sidebar items are the most important to highlight.

There are some possible big changes afoot, and I’m wondering how much time and/or energy I’ll have to actually get this thing going. In short, I’m wondering if I should, indeed, commit to this project. Am I willing to forgo relaxing after a long day at work to write yet another post? Am I willing to skimp on dinner so I can afford to invest in the blog? Right now, the obvious answer is no. We’ll have to wait and see if it stays that way.

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However, I did manage to lock up scottjon.es, which makes me feel slightly better for missing out on scottjones.com by a week, many years ago (stupid aircraft sales company). Yes, that’s a .es extension, which gives the site an international flair without the non-English words. It also shortens it by a few characters and gets rid of the “r” in rscottjones. I thought long and hard about that, as I’ve branded myself as rscottjones for several years now online (it’s my username at every social networking website) and didn’t want to lose that history and momentum. However, the only time I actually use the “r” is for my domain name and logins. Offline, few know that I’m actually R. Scott Jones and not the more generic Scott Jones. Since I started going by Scott in 1990, that’s remained a personal dilemma–apparently one I’m not quite ready to put to rest just yet.

In addition to scottjon.es, I also picked up sjon.es to further reduce character count. I had wanted jon.es, but alas, that was already taken, too. However, sjon.es is not far off and could still prove useful in an increasingly iPhone-like world, where computing devices–and their associated keyboards–continue to shrink. By the way, if you ever need to register a .es domain and don’t speak Spanish, I’d recommend dotster.com. You can purchase in English and pay in dollars, though you’ll fork over nearly twice as much as a normal .com. However, it’s far cheaper than several other .es registrars I found, most of which charged $50-200 a year, apparently mostly to schmucks who clicked on the first link they ran across without checking out the competition. If you do speak Spanish and want a better deal, check out 1and1.es, which sells them for just under $10 after the exchange rate.

Both sjon.es and scottjon.es currently redirect to rscottjones.com. I’m undecided if this will change in the future, and am still contemplating if I wanted to make the full switch over to one of them.

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