Albion Considered started off sometime in 2011 as a tactics blog about West Brom. At the time, football tactics was a niche topic, but one in which interest was growing fast. Sites like Zonal Marking were popularising football tactics and showed that there was a desire amongst fans to read more than the platitudes and hyperbole produced by more traditional sports media. Unsurprisingly, there was very little out there on football tactics relevant to West Brom. With platforms like Wordpress making it easy to write your own blog, and Twitter making it easy to promote, I decided to try and fill this West Brom-shaped hole.

And I did try it, for a bit. I quite liked doing it too. It made me examine matches more closely, and like football all the more because of it. Ultimately though I had to stop, partly because I couldn’t commit to the Friday-preview, Monday-review schedule, but also because I didn’t know anything about football tactics, something that was pretty obvious to anyone that read it. It’s certainly a pretty obvious flaw in most tactics blogs I read now.

I did still want a blog though. I wanted one not because I needed people to read my thoughts, but because I wanted to practice writing. I’m not a good writer, and I’d like to be better, and the only way to get better is to practice. I also wanted a kind of journal where I could record interesting articles I’d read, and what I thought about them. So why didn’t I just write a journal? Because the other purpose of this blog was the chance to play around with building a website. I’ve not ‘built’ AlbionConsidered.com in any sense of the word - it is fully designed and hosted by the amazing Squarespace - but it has given me an opportunity to mess around with CSS and a little HTML, and maybe one day I’ll have messed around enough to actually ‘build’ a site myself.

So, in order to achieve these three goals (practice writing, record interesting things I’ve read, teach myself about website building), I started writing again here, at Albion Considered. In both appearance and style of post it is an unashamed Marco.org rip-off (which is in itself a Daring Fireball rip-off) - that is to say each post will usually be a link to an article that I’ve read, a quoted passage from that article, and a line or paragraph of my own commentary on the issue addressed in that article. I read lots of different stuff, but expect that I’ll mainly be linking to articles about software product development, management and design - because those are things related to my work - as well as articles about football and West Brom, because this is still Albion Considered. There will also probably be links to nice photos, videos and tweets, and once in a while I might write slightly fuller, stand-alone posts of my own.

If you take any time to check out the rest of the site, you’ll see that I’ve actually been doing stuff here for a little while, and you may well wonder why I’ve bothered to write this post now, and why I keep shoving it in your faces on Twitter. The answer is that, whilst I’ve not been writing here to try to gain attention, I am doing it to try to make my writing better. When writing the stuff I’ve posted here so far, I have sometimes noticed that I wasn’t writing properly, that I wasn’t taking enough care with my words nor taking the time to proof-read and edit. Clearly I wasn’t really practicing, and I think this was because there was no pressure, because I knew no one would see it or care. I’d pay more attention, I thought to myself, if there was a greater likelihood that someone might, possibly, actually read what I was writing.

This is why I’ve decided to start promoting the posts I write. Just a bit, anyway. It’s not going to be a “plz share/RT” kind of a thing, so you don’t have to worry about any of that. The theory is that just knowing people might follow a link on Twitter will shame me into trying harder.

So, welcome to Albion Considered. Hope you enjoy following along.