As a new blogger, I’ve run up against a quandary. What do I call the thing?

I hadn’t thought about it in advance, and the reams of instruction and advice that WordPress kindly provides does not appear to extend to the dark art of choosing the right name. And it is an important decision, as any poorly-titled adolescent will tell you. The right one will help win you friends and followers, impress them with your wit and worth, make you memorable. The wrong one – not so much. But I hadn’t considered any of this yet, so I started off using my own name, and staring blankly at the invitation to add something descriptive. What was this blog going to be about? Why was I here? A phrase drifted into my head, a line from an old song that seemed to capture it. And so I started off as Stephanie Saulter | talking back to the night.

But then, a couple of days later as I trawled through experimenting with widgets and themes, I got to thinking. I already have something of an online identity as Scriptopus, the creative writing web app I started a couple of years ago. It’s my handle on Twitter and Goodreads. Shouldn’t I be consistent? Maintain that name, the already familiar tagline? I found where you could change it and, hey presto, became Scriptopus | How many stories can you write today?

And that was okay for a couple more days, during which I was focused on something other than setting up the blog. But then I came back to it, and I thought Hang on. I’ve got this wrong. The Scriptopus website is about group writing. It’s fundamentally collaborative. This blog is supposed to be about what I write, read and think. An expression of the individual, not a report from the collective. Plus by then I’d figured out how to manipulate menus and pages. I realised I could do my duty to the website without saying anything, much less emblazoning it across the header, simply by inserting a tab with a link. So I did that, and reverted to the original title/tag combination, and loaded up a few poems and bits of prose, and went away happy.

You’ve figured out the pattern by now.

I’ve been reading blogs, you see. Other people’s. I’ve been laughing at the creativity of their nomenclature, nodding solemn agreement with their witty tags, and noticing that very few of the good ones use anything as pedestrian and unmemorable as a personal name. It seems like a point of pride almost. And I’d like to feel I belong to this club.

So back to Settings > General > Site Title > Tagline. And a growing sense of ridiculousness. I’m annoyed with myself now, and to anyone else I may have annoyed along the way, my deepest apologies. I’ve made a decision: my name in the URL and authorial credits, the former tagline as title, a simple description. That’s it. This is it, at the top of the screen. No more faffing about. Done.

Unless of course …