How not to blog

Working on this blog has been on my “To Do” list for literally years. I spent a lot of time starting the first incarnation. I talked to friends and looked at probably every option for hosting, content creation and management. Over time I wasn’t happy with the options for creation and display to the users. I had grand ideas and ideals about how I wanted to handle content and what I would blog about.

In the end I posted 13 articles 4 years ago and that was 2 years after I started looking. That’s not a blog, it’s a failed attempt at a modern vanity press. 50 years ago the equivalent would have been the great novel that consisted of a page of paper in a typewriter, a blank stack of paper and unused bottle of white out sitting next to it. It’s a waste of storage and time for everyone involved. The good news is the only people involved was me and a handful of Russian bots according to the logs.

One of the people I asked advice for starting this blog is a friend who is probably the most prolific blogger I know. Neal Krawetz runs the Hacker Factor blog. He warned me up front not to just post every 6 months (maybe he meant to say years). Instead if you are going to do this you need to keep up with it or it isn’t worth doing at all. Wow, did I find that out.

This effort has been my reminder that the perfect is the enemy and good enough wins every time. I’m starting over with throwing out the ideals. No more wanting to use a proper format that could be rendered by archivists in 1000 years on a quantum browser. No more sticking to a super narrow subject. I could push myself and do all of that, but I could also just write what I have in my head right now in something that does a decent job.

To that end I have spent a few hours fixing up a Hugo template to look and do something I sort of like. I will tweak and improve as I go. If I find something better, the good news is all of my content is in Markdown. Yeah it isn’t great, but I could throw it onto your browser and it would be readable. I can also write code to convert it to whatever in nothing flat. I think that choice is a good blog entry. Hopefully if it takes 4 years to write it the reason will be a pile of other content that got written first.

-Shawn