Thoughts on a Decade of Blogging
I just realized that I passed my 10 year blogging anniversary this month. My first post on The Other Tom Elliott was early August of 2009. It really doesn’t seem that long. In that time, I’ve made some less than stellar attempts at humor posts, reported on stand up gigs (not done that in a while), and finally settled on mostly technical posts.
I’ve also moved my blogs several times. From Wordpress to Jekyll, and now over to Medium.
Granted, I’ve had some breaks. Including for most of 2017 and over the whole of 2013. But I’ve still managed to put out enough content to learn some things. Here’s a few learnings I took away from the whole experience.
Making things public is a great motivator
In the interest of giving myself things to write about, I posted some New Years Resolutions for myself over 2009, 2010 and 2011. The first year’s goals got me to try stand up, SCUBA diving and fun runs. Later years pushed me to write a (frankly awful) novel about dating, do some volunteering and climb a mountain — which revealed my fear of heights.
Setting goals and making them public is an excellent way to motivate yourself, and gives you a certain amount of accountability. It’s easy to try to hide your ideas and projects until they’re “ready”, but if you let people know what you plan to do, you might be more likely to do it. Plus, you may get some help along the way that you weren’t expecting.
Problem Solving Posts are Popular
By far the most popular post I’ve written is one about recovering lost recordings in GarageBand. Largely because the title of that particular post is pretty much exactly what people would have Googled when they had this problem.
Searchability aside, writing about problems you’ve solved for yourself is a great way of keeping track of that information for yourself, even if nobody else ever has the same problem. I was hugely surprised to run into an obscure internationalization bug involving the Turkish language a second time about a year after writing it. The second time, it was pretty easy to solve, since I had all the details written down.
Writing nothing is worse than writing something imperfect
As mentioned above, I’ve often gone long stretches without writing anything. A lot of the time, I find it hard to come up with a topic that’s “good enough” to write about. This is a habit I need to get out of.
I’ve written a lot of blog posts that I don’t think are very high quality, but I don’t feel bad about keeping them up. I never know when they might be useful to someone else. I feel a whole lot worse when I don’t write anything at all for a while.
Here’s to the next ten years. Hopefully I’ll be writing a whole lot more.
