Why Blog?
It's a question that occasionally I get asked. And I do like answering questions with unnecessary gusto and going on for quiet some length (often on tagents1).
The really short and concise answer is Chris2.
He convinced/told/muttered at me to do this shortly after he became one of Imperial's mighty bloggers (blogonauts?); I had no real idea what I was going to write about or anything much. The first few months (up to last Christmas) were posts from spur of the moment thoughts.
My last Christmas holiday was...interesting to say the least. Any spur of the moment thoughts I did have didn't get posted, as I probably didn't have enough will to formalise and post here
Thankfully, thanks to a number of people (including, probably, 100% of the readership of this blog), that all got left behind.
The decision to post weekly originally came out of a coincidence of figuring out the scheduled post feature of blogger, and two posts I happened to finish 7 days apart. Like a good stereotypical male, I have never read the instructions and, so far, it hasn't gone catastrophically wrong. Maybe one day I'll get round to finding out all the features that blogger has. One which probably contributed to my posting more than any other is the statistics section
Free statistics was rolled out to all blogger blogs sometime in the summer (June/July) including page view statistics and some quite lovely break downs. I'd like to thank 'Linux, Other' for checking in every week. Between all of you, I'm steadily working up towards the big first marker: 1 kilo Hit.
I'm paying some attention to the hit distribution - and I would be to the comment distribution, if there were any comments - to try and cut anything that is rather disapproved of. What has shown up is that one particular post has made it to near of the Google index for some search terms, despite the marginally unrelated content, which has prompted me to write a follow up post. I've been pushing back its publication every week for over a month, but it'll happen one day!
Of course, the reason for this is that I generally end up writing these post on a Monday morning, having forgot about blogging (apart from the few times I've managed to get a couple of posts ahead, resulting in the bonus Thursday posts). It is currently about 2am, which makes this a post with slightly more leeway than a few :P
However, I still haven't really answered why. The data here is reasonably write-only; I don't really go out of my way to mention my blog. (Except just after writing this, when I brought it up on facebook. Still no link, but a mention of appearing in a G search :P) But, I'd rather not be seen as blowing my own trumpet. What is does for me is make me take an idea, and explain it in English, a skill that often gets lost in computing work. I may have avoided essays, but I can't avoid spelling corrections and complicated questions via IM
Lastly:
Merry Christmas