Blogs are Little Islands

You are not blogging enough. You are pouring your words into increasingly closed and often walled gardens. You are giving control - and sometimes ownership - of your content to social media companies that will SURELY fail.  - Scott Hanselman, Your words are wasted

I enjoy blogging.  I've been doing it since April of 2007 (that's 5 years at the time of this writing!).  For me, it's a great way to work through problems and ideas.  It's kind of a "learning out loud" thing.  And lately, it's been just a way to have some fun with writing.  That's why I'm still doing it, but it's not why I originally started doing it.

I first got into blogging because I wanted to be a part of the community of tech people who were on the interwebs learning from each other and arguing with each other.  That didn't happen, because it turns out a BLOG is not a community.

Blogs are little islands, owned by little dictators.  They've all got large towers built right in the center with mega phones mounted on top, and they're shouting out to sea.  

There's this weird aggregator of shouts out there somewhere, we call it Google.  It archives your shouts, so people searching for a solution to a problem can have a chance of finding the echo of something you yelled long ago.  Of course, that echo has been bouncing around for awhile, and it's probably not terribly accurate any more.  Because of that, we don't shout solutions to problems any more, we do that on StackOverflow now.

But we're all still shouting, so it must be because we want someone to shout back.  But if you even hear my shout, and if you do bother to shout back, the chances I'll hear it are slim.

So instead, maybe you'll fly by my island and drop a leaflet on the beach.  I might pay attention to that, and if I do, I'll leave a leaflet for you on my beach in response.  But you'll never see it, it's my beach and you're not there.

If we're really going to talk, you'll have drive your boat over to my island and stay awhile.  But what a big decision that is for you!  Why would you spend your tourist dollars on my island when there are so many other islands to choose from?  And some of them are much larger, and have many more tourists!

Every island starts out abandoned, with just a lone dictator.  If that dictator is willing to shill for tourists through aggressive marketing, he might attract a bit of a crowd.  But the dictator will still be the dictator and the tourists just tourists.  That's not a great format for interesting conversation...

The little islands model just isn't conducive to building community and having great conversations.  Twitter isn't either, but for different reasons.  And Facebook?  Well it's Facebook.  G+?  *cricket cricket*.  If there's a solution to this problem I don't know what it is.  But I'm pretty sure the solution isn't blogs.

The look and the feel

Those of you who read the random stuff I write here regularly will notice that I changed the blogger template to the real basic one. The reason is because this one stretches to fill the Window.

The length of my posts has been getting longer, and the old template constrained the post content to 460px. Which is just ridiculously small and made the long-ish posts I was writing look like bloody novels.

I may try to spend some time and create a very simple template all my own, but for now I think this one will do just fine. I mean, Steve Yegge uses it, so why can't I?

What are your thoughts on fixed width vs. variable width blogs? And what's an acceptable fixed width for a blog like this one?

State of the Blog

I've been writing this blog for 1 year and 1 month. In that time I have put up 64 posts, that's 4.9 posts per month on average. I've had 76 comments (including my own), that's 1.2 comments per post on average. Feedburner believes there are between 14 and 19 people who subscribe to this blog day to day. Google Analytics indicates that this blog gets anywhere from 8 (on weekends) to 52 Visits a day. The vast majority of those visits are brought in from Google searches.

I find these numbers interesting, but mostly irrelevant. I don't really care what those numbers look like. I'm primarily motived by these three objectives:

1. To challenge myself to keep tackling new problems and learning new things and evaluating the things I have done
   
2. To get in touch with people outside my little company who have different viewpoints and different experiences
3. To keep an archive so I can lookup things I've figured out or thought about in the past or so I can refer other people to them

That said, its good to have goals and its good to evaluate what you're doing (which is the point of this blog after all). Even though this is cheesy and goes against what I usually try to do here, I thought it might be worth a shot: So I want to solicit some feedback and ask a few questions.


I have one person who posts here regularly (thanks Josh!). Frequently he just says "duh" or "I've seen it slightly different" but I love that. It tells me other people have been through it. I'm not looking for expert comments, after all, I'm no expert. But I would really love to hear more of what people think, even if its just a gut reaction.
1. What can I do to draw more comments?


I write about things I'm interested in or working on. That's why the topics range so widely and randomly. I also try to write when I'm confident that I've come to a resolution. That's why what I write is less like a blog and more like little essays or articles. I also write as if what I'm saying is true, even when I know I could be wrong or when I haven't had a chance to exercise the ideas much. I find second guessing and apologizing in writing to be really irritating and I assume you'll do the second guessing on your own as you read.
2. Should I change anything about the topics or style?


I write when I have something to say. I shoot for 4 posts a month (but not necessarily one a week). Other than that I don't keep a schedule. I do this because I don't want to publish half formed thoughts or minor mostly content-less topics. But I've read lots of people who say you should post on a regular schedule.
3. Should I adopt a schedule?


I write this stuff for fun mainly. But it would be more fun if it was less one sided.
4. Do you have any feedback, or is it all perfect just the way it is?

Posting Code on blogger

I finally found a decent way to post code on this blog. Its not hard, I just didn't know how...

Here's how. Just add the following css class definition in your blog's template:

.code {
color: $textcolor;
white-space: pre;
background: #ebebeb;
overflow: auto;
border: 1px inset;
padding: 4px 4px 4px 4px;
font-size: 85%;
font-family: courier new;
}

Then when you want to post some code, switch to the Edit Html view and wrap the code with a div class like so:

<div class="code">DisplaySampleCode();</div>

The "white-space: pre" part makes it so the browser will display all the spaces you've typed (normally it removes excess spaces). "pre" stands for pre-formatted. This is a reference to the <pre> tag in html.

The "overflow: auto" part tells it to display a scroll bar if the content of the div is too big to fit within the area of the div.

Why?!

There are a few reasons for this blag.

1. I like to write my opinions about software and technology like things.
   
2. There is a wide community of people on the interweb who are writing similar things. This blog might allow me to join them.
3. I have a website which includes a forum that I wrote in ASP over 5 years ago (as of this posting). Its been great fun, but it doesn't allow me to blog, as it were. Its too open and public. Its also hosted on a computer in my basement, which isn't terribly reliable.
4. I thought I should learn how this blogging software worked.

I may port things I wrote on my original website to this blog if I feel like I'm getting something out of this. If I do, I'll indicate that's where it came from along with the original date in the interest of full disclosure.

And with that...