These are notes to
myself and anyone else interested in the blogging process.
We are now a month
or so into the third year of writing this blog and many things have
been learned but nothing too unexpected. Many intermediate goals
are proceeding along very well. Its probably my single most
successful project of the last 5 years or so, take that for what you
will.
The two things
holding it back are my normal tendency to fail to be very organized
in achieving long term goals and the amount of time to do a post when
one is trying to be productive in other areas. These are not new
issues, but I want to go over them briefly anyway.
The advantage of the
blog process is that it can tolerate a “skip around and talk about
whatever pops into your head” work process. It can tolerate a
“five different posts in progress but this one is the closest to
finishing so lets do it and put it up”. But there are other things
in life that do not respond to this devil-may-care, gotta-be-free,
seat-of-the-pants life style. These things may require a “do these
five things by this date and three of those things are really
obnoxious and not fun at all”, or may require addressing unpleasant
topics or modest amount of confrontation. But in these tasks,
failure to make the deadline (which may not even be explicitly known)
or failure to do one of the five tasks no matter how well you did the
other four results in a total wash. It is as if you did no work at all.
So the blogging
process must accommodate these other, less forgiving projects.
The second issue is
that a decent post is a solid 4 or so hours of serious work. Again
not a surprise. Not all posts take this long, this post is taking a
little over an hour. But in general my best essays, the ones that
contribute the most value and are the most entertaining require many
hours of thinking, writing, rewriting, some research, selection of
visual materials, and so forth. This is the kind of work that a
good client proposal might require or making some progress on a
technical project that one has ongoing.
Anyway, it won't
surprise you that it can be very hard to find those 4 plus hours when
trying to make progress in other things, traveling to conferences,
dealing with society, etc. Some days have at best one 4 hour period
of dedicated work in it. Some days don't even have that.
So when you do not
see a post, or a post of substance for a while, it probably has as
its subtext that whatever is going on in my life is getting in the
way of applying that serious time to finish or write a post.
A minor issue for the blog is that as it gets more material, it needs to be reorganized, with better choices of tags, various subject pages and so forth. That project will be a little
nasty, like cleaning the kitchen floor, and also like cleaning the
floor, becomes more annoying the longer one postpones it.
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