One of the things about writing a blog is that there has to be something to write about. I am a regular reader of Coding Horror because of two reasons:
- Jeff Attwood writes good articles
- He does one every working day of the week
This is no mean feat. I’ve been reading his blog for about 6 months and I can honestly say that, although there is a central theme running in his posts, I haven’t detected any obvious repetition yet. When I think about what I’ve achieved in the same time frame I’ve probably managed one-or-two per month!
I recently heard Jeff talk and I think I have an idea at why he’s so much more prolific: he’s prolific. He has made a commitment to himself to publish every working day and he does. And this effort generates momentum, which generates traffic to his site that generates comments and trackbacks that fuel further ideas for him to write about. Where he has intertia, I am inert.
As for the inspiration it’s like anything. The more you do it the more you can do it. It’s a form of exercise for your writing brain. Once you start writing the ideas start to flow. I’ve been in love with the idea of writing for a long time, so perhaps I should follow the advice from his .NET rocks article and make a commitment to publish.
My original reason for beginning this blog was to write about the technical tricks and traps that I discovered. Mostly as a source of documentation but also as an experiment. But lots of people do this, because it means you don’t have to think about what you write. Yes, it serves a useful purpose because it means that a lot of problems I encounter can easily be looked up and fixed. But if someone else writes it and documents it am I adding anything by doing the same? I know the answer to this has to be no. If 95% of the internet disappeared tomorrow I’m still pretty sure I could Google to find out the syntax for adding a CONSTRAINT to a MySQL database table.
Please believe me. I’m not looking for the fame or hits. Just looking for my voice. When I find it I’ll be sure to let you know.