A decade ago, I wrote my first post about RSS, and how I wished someone would aggregate events via RSS. I’m still waiting for this 🙂

I had recently come back from a trip abroad, and was a young contract programmer living as cheaply as I could. One decade on, I am a married father with a house who is a full time employee. Things change, but I still blog.

A decade of blogging has taught me many things. How much I enjoy teaching, how widely the Internet lets you reach, how much people care about Yahoo Mail and dating software, how powerful Google is. But most of all, how writing about something helps you truly understand it.

I’ve been hot and cold on blogging–sometimes posting every couple of days and interacting with the commenters, sometimes ignoring my blog and treating it is a write only medium. Either way, the corpus of 600+ posts (more than one post a week) and the thousands of visits per month the blog gets, are gratifying.

I look back on proudly on all my blog posts. And I can’t tell you how fun it is to hear from someone that I’ve helped them, or to run across a post of mine when I’m doing a google search, or to see from where people have linked to my articles.

Here’s to another decade.

After many moons (almost 7 years), I switched up my theme to a more modern (thought still stark) one.

Why?

• The older theme was borked in a couple of ways that I couldn’t be bothered to investigate.
• I wanted something that was more responsive and a better experience for mobile users (only 6% of my traffic in 2013 is mobile, and I’m hoping to increase that).
• Sometimes it’s just time for a change.

So, I hope you enjoy the new theme.  Same dorky content, new dorky look!

Wow, it is hard to believe it has been nine years since my first post.  This is the 660th post!

When I started my blog, I was just back from a sabbatical in Australia, living in a rented basement.  Now I’m a family man with a house.  When I started, I was a contractor, happy to get $40/hr to do development, tracking time and invoicing using MS word docs.  Now I use google docs for almost everything, am an employee, and manage a department.

The benefits of blogging keep me going.  I encourage everyone I meet to start a blog, because I think the act of writing forces you to crystallize your thoughts.  It has certainly crystallized mine.  I also enjoy the historical record, much like a public journal, and the projects I can look back on.  Plus, it is fun to occasionally hear someone say ‘I ran across a post you wrote’.

My blog has been much more about broadcast than conversation.  I think that’s because it varies in content, and in quality, and in timeliness.  The couple of posts that have blown up were due to them turning into forums on a controversial topic (Yahoo Mail problems, Skadate review).  But I’m OK with that.

I wish I had twice the time to write, but am happy that I’ve had the time I’ve had.

Thanks for reading!

This is something I tell everyone I run into (because I think everyone has an interesting story to tell), so I wanted to outline my thoughts once and for all.

If there is any area of your life (professional life, hobby, future career) that you care about and of which you want to improve your understanding, you can do no better than to blog about the topic as regularly as you can.

Now, this isn’t the golden age of blogging, when you could be the only tailor/wine merchant/banker/etc blogging, and blog your way to fame, conferences, and riches.  There are countless blogs out there now (almost 1.3 million, according to technorati).  But you can still differentiate yourself from most by blogging.

I believer there are many many reasons to blog, but the strongest are:

• you demonstrate tremendous credibility when you blog.  This credibility isn’t earned immediately, but after you invest some time (a year or so), you’ll have credibility when someone searchs for you on the web, or when you tell a prospective employer/customer/client “oh, I encountered that problem, let me send you an article about that” and you do.  A blog works for you even when you are sleeping–I’ve had random people contact me about a blog article, and I’ve had people I know say “I was searching for topic yyy and ran across your blog”.
• you will learn more about the subject you are writing about than you thought possible.  I never know something so well as when you can explain it to someone else.  In addition, as you write post after post, you’ll find new dimensions to your subject, new people to interview (a great way to build content for your blog and to make connections), new questions to ask, and new organizations or companies relevant to you.
• it is free, except for your time.  Other than opportunity cost and some thought, a blog doesn’t cost you anything.  This makes it a low risk marketing effort.

One bonus benefit: you own all the content you create!  Unlike what you post on twitter, which is ephemeral, or what you post on facebook, which is hard to export, most blogging software lets you import and export with relative ease.  There are services out there that will help you package your blog as a book.

Here are three objections that you may have to blogging.

• Aren’t I giving my knowledge away for free? — Well, yes, if you solve the exact same problem that someone else has.  In my experience, it is much more likely that someone will have a similar problem, in which case your post is an advertisement for your services instead.  And if you solve someone’s exact problem and never see a dime for it, that’s good karma.  Now, I wouldn’t encourage someone to blog about a trade secret or an entire idea for which they are trying to get a patent, but they might blog about the process of getting there, or about a similar idea that they investigated but found lacking.
• I can’t write — This is a two part answer.   One, you should get better at writing, since it is a key part of business today.  And practicing on a blog is one great way to do it.  Two, if you can’t write or don’t feel it is applicable to your skill set (you are, say, a photographer) and I can’t persuade you that it is *still* a good idea to write well, then you can blog using other media.  Video blogging, photo blogging and audio blogging are all options to which all of the good points I’ve made above apply, and none of them require you to write a word (I don’t have experience with those typs of blogging, but a quick search should help you find a platform).
• I don’t have the time — Ah, finally, a good objection!  A blog does not have quick payback; it can be a year of writing a post every ten days before you get 20 visitors a day.  If you choose to invest in your career in another way (writing open source, if you are a programmer, toastmasters if you are a salesman, volunteering at a daycare if you are interested in childcare, etc, etc) I admire you.  I think these other investments shine in other ways, but they lack the scalability, reach and timelessness of a blog.  So, consider your priorities, and if blogging’s benefits aren’t enough to justify a time investment, I wish you well.

Ok, I have convinced you to blog, right?  Three next steps:

1. Sign up for an account on blogger or wordpress.com.  Spend 10 minutes picking a look and feel and setting up an about me page, but don’t spend more than that.  It’s very easy to get obsessed with how your blog looks and ignore the content!  (You can always go back in six months and change your look.)
2. Write your first blog post!  Don’t have it be an ‘about me’ post; jump right into the meat of what you want to explore, be it Tanzanian politics, the economics of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ or space technology.
3. Decide how much time you want to spend on your blog going forward.  How much time should you devote?  Enough so that your blog is active, which I define as a post a week (your mileage may vary).  More if you have time.  Also, realize that you will have good months and bad months.  I’ve been blogging for over 8 years and have had months where I struggled to get one post up (and sometimes failed–I’m looking at you, November 2011), and others where I posted every other day.  I also suggest writing a bunch of posts when you have the time and/or urge.  These you can then schedule so that when you don’t have time, you can still be putting new content out there.

And a bonus step: find other bloggers out there, using Google or your search engine of choice, and comment on their blogs.  This brings you into a conversation and avoids ‘shouting into the wilderness’ syndrome of a blog that no one but you visits, which can be so disheartening.

Go do it!

In the spirit of this post, I wanted to outline what I shipped this year.  (Shipped in the sense of software–building something and putting it out to the world.  Personal achievements in the past year, not least of which was getting married to my lovely wife, aren’t in the scope of this list.)

• 41 blog posts on this blog, and 95 posts on two others I run.
• Many, many releases (over 20) of COhomefinder.com.
• Released version 2.0 of a dating site for the mentally ill.
• Rewrote my Colorado CSAs directory and vastly increased the number of CSAs contained.
• With a team, researched and presented a plan for a local Boulder currency.
• Scoped, built (with a team), and launched an ecommerce website.
• Set up a scholarship for a permaculture course.

As Seth said about his list, there were other projects I didn’t have the guts or follow through to launch, but I’m pretty happy with this list.  Here’s to 2011!