Where to Write?
I haven’t written in a while. There a few reasons for that which I’d like to share.
I bought a paper journal. I write in it almost every weekday. It’s a great outlet for me and allows me to write different things that I would write on my blog or other platforms.
I participate more on Google+ now. As much as I feel Google is somewhat evil, people I enjoy interacting with are on there talking about stuff I’m interested in. I check Google+ every day. I’m on Facebook once a week, at best.
I’m actually really into things at work. I’ve been submitting patches to u-boot, hacking on an evil vendor kernel (hacking is being nice to the quality of code that’s coming out of my fingers), and making things happen for customers.
My family situation has changed since July. My wife went back to work in late August after staying home with our daughter for a year after she was born. Now we have a new morning routine that’s much more family oriented which limits my morning time that I was dedicating to making things on the web or starting blog posts.
Bitching on the web isn’t what most people want to read. A decent number of the blog posts I’ve written over the last year include bitching. My readership hasn’t grown.
Clearly, I’m doing it wrong. That needs to change. In July I wrote many blog posts but my readership was basically flat compared to earlier months where I wrote drastically less. I have a small group of readers who follow via RSS or check in on a regular basis to read what I write, but a good chunk (over 50% last check) is Google searches. Most of those Google searches end up directing people to my more technical posts. Clearly that’s where the value is.
When I got the job I have now, the company was impressed with the fact that I blogged about technical topics. That excited them. We recently interviewed a guy who started his own blog about 6 months ago, that’s impressive to me, too. But it’s impressive, both of them, for their technical content, not for the bitching.
Don’t be surprised if I blog at this reduced rate in the future. If I don’t have something technical to say, I’m not going to write it.