My Blog

Last night while hanging out with friends watching the VT game, Pat gave me some great feedback on my blog. Pat's feedback was:

1. He hates how my blog is on so many random topics.
2. He could care less about my bench press statistics and other personal topics.
3. The technical topics are often too technical.

I love user feedback. I have spent much of the last 24 hours debating in my mind what I should do differently. So I started thinking about my blogging over the last year, my favorite bloggers, and blogs I wish other people would write.

I like my blog because I find it a very convenient place to record information about my life. For instance, if I learn about a useful new UNIX command that I won't necessarily need everyday, but I might want to use it in the future, I put it on my blog so that I can easily google for it when I need it. I certainly could put this information on my desktop or on the network drive someplace, but I like the fact that Google will crawl my page and make it easy for me to find later. I also believe that other people will find the information useful and I've certainly had enough feedback over the last year to know that to be true.

I realize that some people don't like the mix of personal and work related posts. But my work is a huge part of my life and I like having a single place to record everything. I'm certain that the majority of my readership is either co-workers or family and I'm certain that they care about both work and personal topics. I think I would split my blog in two if I blogged about a very specific topic often. For example, if I decided to focus on a specific topic like MySQL and put myself out there as a MySQL expert I would certainly break that blog out into a new one.

But that's not what I'm trying to do, more times than not my goal is simply to record the information so that I can reference it at a later date.

I have several personal goals when it comes to weighlifting, but the main one revolves around bench pressing. I certainly don't blog about bench pressing because I'm bragging or I'm the biggest guy at the gym. I'm certainly proud of where I'm at and where I want to go, but I'm still a really small guy. I blog about it because it's an easy way for me to track my progress. It's also very motiviational because I know my co-workers are reading this blog and I will be less likely to quit if I'm trying to prove that I can reach the goals I set for myself.

My blog really only focuses on these topics:

1. Goals
2. Work
3. College Football
4. Hobbies
5. Family

I could definitely stop blogging about college football. It's my favorite sport and I love
talking about it, but I would hardly consider myself an expert. So from here forward, no more
college football posts.

I consider baseball, softball, and golf as my hobbies. I like blogging about them, again, to
track my progress and have some sort of history recorded.

I think I'll keep my blog the way it is, except I'm going to cut out talking about my favorite
sport. Thanks for the feedback Pat, it was good to hear and gave me a chance to reflect on
exactly why I blog. The cool thing about blogging is that it is super easy to "unsubscribe". ;)

This also gave me the oppurtunity to review the blogs I subscribe to and why I like reading those blogs. Here are my favorite blogs:

Joel on Software
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Joel is always spot-on when it comes to software development. His blog is very focused and rarely drifts off topic. I think it's the type of blog that Pat would love to read because you gain
useful knowledge with each post. He rarely posts but when he does the article is usually gold.

Jeremy Zawodny
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Jeremy's style is much like mine. He is all over the place and you usually have to filter out the topics that don't interest you. But overall it's a very entertaining blog and well worth following. Similar to how Pat doesn't care about my bench pressing, I really don't have any interest in hearing about Jeremy's flying hobby. I follow Jeremy's blog because he doesn't have any problem telling it how it is and calling out BS when he sees it. It's a good window into Yahoo! too.

Liz
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Liz's blog is great because she's not afraid to blog about anything. She'll tell you exactly how she feels about a topic and you can really tell it's genuine and not faked. I only know Liz via her boyfriend Jesse, but by following her blog I feel like I know more about her than I do Jesse.

That's a pretty amazing statement considering I knew Jesse for four years in college. I like people who blog often enough that you get the feeling that you know them, even though you may have never even met.

I wish many of friends who blog more often. Here are the people I wish blogged more and why:

Velvet
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I love Velvet's flickr site, you can really get a feel for her personality from her pictures. I
love her blog too, but I just wish she posted more frequently. She has accomplished so much with her running, weight loss, and raising two great kids that I feel she is holding back on us.

Pat
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I'm guessing Pat would like to blog more often but probably has trouble find the time. I think Pat is the expert when it comes to email hosting and he should just lay it all out there. I also think many of our employees could learn a great deal about sales, marketing, and running a business from Pat and he could use his blog to help educate us all.

Mike
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I'm sure Mike learns something new about web development everyday. I would love for him to start sharing this information with the rest of us. Teach us about prototype, javascript, php, browser bugs, etc. I consider Mike to be an expert at web development and I would love to see him become more widely recognized as such.

Bill
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This cat knows more about spam, smtp, and infrastructure than anyone. Please share!!!


My Developers
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I wish it was a requirement for all of my developers to blog daily. Give me a paragraph on what you accomplished today. What better way for me to stay on top of everything but at the same time stay out of your hair. :)

OK, this post is getting long, I'll stop now. But just for you Pat, I'll give you an update on my running in a bit... ;)