Thoughts on the Daily Technical Blog Entry... is it still possible?

Almost two weeks ago, I contemplated about the possibility of making a "technical" post daily... because I was just starting on my blog and really needed to find a good rhythm. Well, now I have my conclusion (more on that later). I knew that if I did not make myself write a post periodicially, I will easily lapse into months long hiatus before releasing lengthy articles that take me forever to write, edit, and I probably will make 12 posts a year.

That is just not how I imagined I would like to interact with readers of my blog, so I am forcing this habit on me to see how I would respond... and it seems to be working out mostly well. The past several weeks I have been able to pace myself with a technical blog entry or two every weekday, and I am certainly able to pick up and maintain a queue of future articles simply by browsing through various newsgroups that interest me.

"Upcoming" RSS Feed

I am contemplating making an RSS feed out of the queue of future blog posts, so that those of you who have posted me private questions know that I have not forgotten about your questions and can see live progress on them prior to the full answer being posted. In some senses, it is like a RSS feed of the "upcoming" semi-planned blog entries. Let me know what you think of this idea.

Of course, I will still be blogging on a daily basis. The "upcoming" RSS feed is more of a way for me to give you more feedback because I realize that posting "Contact" questions is very impersonal in terms of feedback. You just do not know what I am doing with it and when...

Newsgroup Transition...

Nowadays, when I normally would sit down and make a long newsgroup post, I will simply start a blog entry with an appropriate title instead. When I finish with that entry, I post the URL back to the newsgroup post as the "answer".

And now that I have done this for a short while, I am finally reaping a nice side-effect. I can directly answer some questions by simply pointing back to a URL of my blog's archive... which feels GREAT. I do not have to spend time and write that answer again, and hopefully, that guy will browse my blog for some other related answers. At least, that is my hope. I do not know if it happens in reality.

A couple more thoughts before I wrap up on this post... if you haven't caught the drift of what I have decidied about blog entries already... :-)

What is this Blog "thing" anyways?

I have noticed that Google and a lot of trackback links from RSS feed sites are my blog's best friend. I am mildly surprised at how high Google is ranking some of my blog entries for relevance on various topics. It really makes me wonder how it figures out the page ranking....  But anyhow, I encourage you guys to keep searching and finding my blog entries interesting and useful. This blogging effort is mostly FOR YOU from me.

I have also decided that I need to interject more "personal" entries and thoughts into my blog. No, not stuff like personal chatter because that is just boring, but I do want to give some context on what I am thinking about and like to do... which kinda reflects on the rest of my blog entries. I think it just fleshes out the author a bit more, especially since I am talking about technical content all the time.

I think that I do not get comments on my blog entries because the content of the blog entries are too one-dimensional. They just pose a question and give a complete answer. What is there to comment on? Nice job? Thanks for the answers? Gee, absolutely no room for interaction. No bantering. No related questioning.

Well, I will be changing that, bit by bit, so thanks for hanging around, and the feedback is great. Things are just getting started...

//David