It’s taken some time to orient myself to this whole blogging thing. Time for me to attempt to analyze the past year of my experience with macro- and micro-blogging.
Writing, it’s not coding
In July 2007, I switched from hand-coding posts (like a caveman mashing berries to paint buffalo on the walls of a cave), to using WordPress to publish my thoughts to the Internet. Cutting out the coding made writing a lot easier. All good so far.
When I started this blog, my goal was to spend more time writing and less time coding. Since then, I have satisfied my lust to write more often.
Figuring out what to write about has become the real issue.
Subject matter & accessible means
There’s no shortage of great, new things to talk about. But honestly, few are worthy of writing about.
The last 30 days, I gave MarsEdit a try. It’s a nifty app for the Mac that integrates with my blog. Making blogging even more accessible, so I posted frequently. After the MarsEdit trial expired, my posting slowed to a trickle.
Lesson learned: Keeping the drawing board visible definitely encouraged me to write more often.
Appropriate presentation
While my posts were frequent, the quality of each post fluctuated. Many of my posts were just links to elsewhere. Which is fine, and does deserve some presence on my blog. But, the presentation for links is the same as the posts I put more thought into. Unfair treatment.
Conclusion: links and posts deserve different presentation.
Tweeting prunes blogging
Twitter is micro-blogging, it’s what happens between blog posts and emails. Watch this video, for an introduction and explanation: Twitter in plain English. Twitter has helped me understand that my blog shouldn’t be just a place I dump links to the latest, greatest thing. (But Twitter isn’t a link dump either!)
Twitter has, in essence, helped me groom the unworthy quips from my blog. It’s made me more critical of the content I post here. Center stage is no place for nonsense.
Shifting the direction
My goals for this site still include writing more. Although I’d like to continue to focus on only writing when I’ve got something worth writing about. I’ll hopefully spend more time thinking about one thing, than less time thinking about many things. Deepen the stream, not widen it.
Streaming everything here
At some point I would like to widen the scope of this site. I’d love to see all my content from across the web aggregated here. (Flickr, Twitter, Google Reader, Del.icio.us, Digg, Upcoming, Skitch, etc…) But I won’t do this until I have the time and energy to give the right visual presentation to the content that has more value.
That’s all for now. Dovidenia! (Slovak for goodbye ;)
What do you think?
2 comments
1 Andrew Brown Oct 4, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Its good to see you and other web-designers/developers investing more time in writing. The Internet is over saturated with web-designers that focus on their gradients and neglect or don’t realize the purpose of a web-site is about delivering well organized and high quality content.
2 Jason Robb Oct 5, 2008 at 11:44 am
Quite true, Andrew. Although I wouldn’t argue my content is high quality, I certain believe it will improve over time. I appreciate the compliment though!
Design is about constraints and reaching achievable goals. Gradients and rounded corners do not equal design. ;) Thanks for stopping by!