One year of blogging

Just over one year ago  I started this blog.
At the time I had no idea whether I’d really keep at it. It seemed like an interesting thing to do. And I knew several people with blogs which I read (and still read).
As I noted in my inaugural post, it was my intention to keep this as something like a public diary. Pretty much everything I write about is for my own benefit. And now that I look back upon a year of posting, at a rate of just over 1 per week, I am glad I started.

My memory can be pretty bad at times, and it’s nice to be able to look back at the things I’ve done, and what I was thinking about them at the time.

Whilst I do look at the blog stats, and see which posts get more reads than others, generally it’s a matter of interest, rather than something I react to. It is not really surprising that whenever I’ve written about Navit, which is of interest to other geeks, then I get a lot of page hits. Where as when I write (much more often) about my latest wood turning project, I get very little interest. Woodturners are mostly retired guys who are not really into computers. But I spend a lot more of my free time doing wood turning and other practical projects, so those are the things I wrote most about.

The other thing I started doing in the last year, is using twitter. Twitter seems to of become much more well known in the last couple of months and it is interesting to see how people use it. Personally I find it a good companion to my blog in terms of giving me a slightly public diary. I use it to note more of the random things I’m upto at any given time. Where I write blog posts about more substantial events and projects.

I started this mostly as an experiment. And I have to confess I did not expect that I would keep it up. But as it turns out I have gotten into a nice little routine, of coming to my local shopping centre cafe ‘Boswells’ of a Saturday or Sunday. I sit and eat breakfast, drink coffee, and write a blog post about what I’ve been up to. Instrumental in this is my much loved n810 and the bluetooth keyboard I bought for it. I always have them on me, and it doesn’t require any organisation or carrying space really. I think if I only wrote on my laptop, I would write less often and maybe would not of developed a consistent habit.

But I have, and I find that I enjoy keeping a blog, in a way I don’t think I would of enjoyed keeping a regular diary, or scrap book, or whatever else normal non-geeks might do. And so I shall continue into another year.