Reflecting on crossing the 3,000 posts mark

I thought I’d take a moment and reflect on the fact that this blog, in its current incarnation, has just crossed a milestone of 3,000 posts.

First and foremost I’d like to thank those who do subscribe and follow this blog on a regular basis. It is always very satisfying to know that others see value in the work that you provide.

That said, I will say that the major reason I invest time writing this blog is for myself. For me it serves two major purposes. Firstly, it is a way for me to document things that I have done and reinforce my learning. Secondly, it is a communications practice. I consider that to be a:

Core Professional Skill

Another side benefit I believe of investing time in writing a blog is that it becomes a:

Living resume

That you can point to as your commitment to your profession.

Blogging for business

I have always admired the consistency of content that Seth Godin creates on his blog and I really like this recommendation he makes about blogging:

Seth Godin and Tom Peters on blogging

and I totally agree with the analysis of the value of blogging professionally and personally.

Although the earliest post here is from July 2007, in truth, this blog has been going for longer. If my memory serves me correctly, I started it back in the 2005 timeframe on a dedicated server box using dedicated software that published my musing to an internal web server that I made available to the world. Back then the whole blogging process was very complex to manage and maintain but I kept at it.

A little while down the track I shift the blog to an internal SharePoint server, which I again published to the world. After a while that too became hard to maintain and began to fill up with blog spam comments. Who’d though eh? At that point I shift the platform to Google Blogger where it remained for many years. That was until about 2 years ago when Google changed their API for Blogger and I could no longer post images on my blogs using Open Live Writer. I therefore migrated the blog to its current home here on WordPress and have been very happy with the platform.

Over the years I have experimented with monetising my content using ads but found that it largely distracted from the content I was creating. It also made the site look and feel ‘cheap’ to me. Thus, I no longer publish ads to the blog, although with more than 3,000 posts there might be some handy income available. The only ‘monetization’ I do have on my blog are crypto tip jars:

bitcoin:bc1qwgcr296c7rtjvlpkv9yy5033qjgwwrvttxhtm7

ethereum:0xD7cc991E1f84B625C3723D2965C9948238F5DFe8

and to my knowledge, I’ve never received a payment. That isn’t an issue because, as I said, I write this blog mainly for myself, however the tip jars are there as an experiment to see whether they in fact will get used. As yet, they haven’t, but they’ll stay there in the hope that one day they might because I like the concept of being able to quickly and easily ‘tip’ people for the content they create on the web via micropayments. Trying to monetise blog content is far to hard using traditional means, so that is why the crypto tip jars exist. However, I fully appreciate that until cryptocurrency becomes more wide spread that I’ll probably never see anything. That is fine, because everything you see here is an on going ‘experiment’.

I’ve always tried to be consistent with my blog and create content regularly. Of course, that has varied over time as work and life gets in the way. Sometime too, I will readily admit, that blogging can be a chore. Luckily, those situation haven’t lasted long and I feel I’ve been disciplined to continue to create content regularly, and as I said earlier, be able to create a growing body of work that demonstrates a commitment to my profession.

Apart from consistency, another important aspect of blogging is personality. I am not a fan of blogs that ‘re-purpose’ content to re-brand and claim as their own. As Seth’s video illustrates, you don’t have to be ‘good’ at it, you just keep doing it and you’ll get better at it. However, as with most things on the Internet, too many see it as a ‘short cut’ to fame fortune and getting rich quick. To me, your blog needs to come from you. It should be things that you learned, observed and desire to share with others. I cannot tell you the number of times I have read other blogs that have helped me trying to solve some curly challenge. If what I have worked out can help another, that is the way that I pay it forward. To me, that was the promise of the Internet that has unfortunately largely been lost in its drive to commercialism. Nostalgic? Maybe. Luckily, blogging is still going strong and one mechanism that anyone can use to express themselves to a world wide audience.

I have shared many of my thoughts and opinions on business and technology via this blog. The process of actually writing these makes you stop and think about them It makes you craft better arguments, given the audience could be anyone, anywhere. It is also fun to look back at such post, through the lens time and reflect on how they actually turned out as well whether the situation today is different. History can teach us many things, and having your own can be humbling as well as it can be uplifting.

I’ll finish off where I started, thanking those who make the time to read what I write here. I’m always keen to hear from those who do so and I’d encourage you to reach out and if nothing else, just say hi. Knowing that others are finding value from what you create always helps when sometimes you wonder why you bother doing what you do.

The plan is continue doing what I do here. The more I learn, the more I write and as you can see, over the past 3,000 posts, I have learned a lot thanks largely to the technology profession I am engage in. However, no matter who you are or what you do, I encourage you to start a blog and stick with it. I’m confident, that like me, if you stick with it, you too will see benefits like I have.