Blogging with Purpose

12/08/14

So, I asked for feedback on my blog from one of my friends.

I'm not sure if I should name him. Hmmm.... On one hand, I don't think he'd care, but on the other hand, I haven't asked him. Also, I don't know how I feel talking to or about any reader not named Stephan, Stephan. If he reads this and wants to be named, I'll name him.

Anyways, he pointed out that whether or not my blog is good is based on its purpose. Am I going for readers? Is it a diary? Is it to get me doing things I wouldn't be doing otherwise?

This was a really good point. I didn't really think about it's purpose too heavily. Yeah, I have a post here and there alluding at least to a purpose. But one isn't clearly defined by any means.

So, what do I want out of this blog? I don't care too much about how many people read it. Not yet, at least. I like knowing at least one other person reads it. So, it affects me a bit. (Don't stop reading, Stephan. [Seriously.])

It is definitely a bit of diary blog. I care about improving documentation, and I feel the most important part of improving that skill is to do it regularly. As documentation, I care about tracking the sources that helped me achieve whatever I was trying to accomplish. As a diary, this blog is also something I want to use to explore what I want to do and how I want to do it. It's a brainstorming tool. It's also a log of the books I read and what I think about what I read. It's a slow-capture spark file, capturing ideas that echo inside my head a fair amount of times.

I would like to attempt more serious writing here, though. A good tutorial or process on how to do the things I'm doing. I'd like to write some fiction. Polishing and refining my ideas would be ideal. A lot of blogs I read will end up repeating their ideas again and again. They get really good at saying what they care about saying this way, I think.

So, I'm not going to avoid repeating myself. If I find myself returning to a topic I've written about before, I'm just going to go with it, even if it's mostly the same content.

Blog posts will still stay pretty casual overall. I think any non-casual posts I write may go into a different area of my site, even. A proper articles area, or something. A place for more serious, more sporadic content. Whereas this will be right off my brain, but there'll be new content everyday. Have a place for "Quality, not quantity" and "quantity, not quality".

I like this blog. A lot. It helps me explore what I want to do, and I see myself getting results, and I'm getting a log history of what I'm doing and who I am everyday.

Also, I think today marks the first month straight I've managed to blog everday.

Awesome.