the blog experiment

So as you know, since you are reading this blog currently, I have a blog now. Welcome to 2002, Matt, everyone has a blog these days. Now that its been running for two weeks I wanted to do a meta-post about my blog.

I have a wide array of interests, from video games to progressive politics to linguistics. I decided though that I wanted to write a technology blog to increase my professional stature on the cybernets. It hasn't always been easy, some days I've had little inspiration in the technology part of my life, but something burning in the politics part of my brain. I strive though to keep this blog about programming and software and sometimes rage filled rants. When I started this blog I came up with a strategy for how I wished to drive traffic to the blog.

• Post everyday - When people can reliably expect some new content they will come and look for it or set up a feed reader to your site. The Daily WTF posts something everyday, and although most days I read the story with a "meh" I still come back every time the lunch whistle blows.


• More than words - I wanted to avoid the wall of text, breaking up posts with a related image, code snippet, or youtube embed makes that post more memorable and more valuable.


• Shameless self-promotion - Every post I write is followed up with a tweet, shouting to my co-workers about how great I am telling them to read my post, texting people, shining a special "Matt-signal" into the perpetually overcast Columbus sky

The Good:

• I have had a few neat things happen so far, I've gotten comments from people I know and respect Rick, Jeremiah, etc. and somewhat more exciting, comments from random people I don't know.


• Knowing that I need to produce content has had my creative brain juices flowing, it has spurred me to learn about ruby, powershell, and lisp.


• Wanting to produce quality content has caused me to dig deeper into things than I normally would have, leading to more learning, and bonus for you, better content


• Launched my first self-designed website and had somewhere to brag about it
  

The Bad:

• Writing a post everyday is hard, even when I have an idea, doing the research, linking things up nicely, and trying to write something that people will want to read is a daunting task.


• Failed to get anyone to join up with my I'll pimp your site if you pimp mine old school 1990's style blog-ring (I really only tweeted this once so its not like I tried very hard)


• Scant feedback. Sometimes starting up a blog is a lot like shouting into the darkness, it is very exciting to get a comment on a post, even when its someone disagreeing with you, at least you know someone's reading.

So I'm going to keep on keeping on, I'm going to post something everyday, I've got 4 or 5 posts saved up for a series I'm hoping to publish soon. The blog has been a positive thing for me, it has kept me learning, communicating, and creating.

Let me know what you think about the blog, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I'm going to keep up with my post a day schedule for a while longer, so check back in daily or follow my blog to get a little sliver of goodness everyday.

Post a day doesn't include weekends, people have better things to do on the weekends than read blog posts, like program lisp