Code & Sundry

Jon G Stødle

A year of blogging

407 words, 3 minutes to read

One year ago I set myself a goal: I'm going to write more on my blog. I made a two step plan to accomplish this goal:

  1. Move my blog to Ghost, which has a really nice editor and I wanted to get off Wordpress.
  2. Force myself to post something every ten days.

As of February 28th I've published a post every ten days for a whole year. on my blog hosted on Ghost.

I very often find it's easier to do something if there's a structure to follow. For my blogging, that meant a new post every ten days. Had the goal just been post more often, I'd never gotten around to do it. After getting started with a few posts, I feel the need to keep streak going. "I've managed a post every ten days for 3 months now, I can't stop now!". I'm not going to say all of the blog posts have been stellar work, but I'm glad I've been able to stick with it.

The topics often lean towards programming, but I think I've managed to vary the content a bit. Some of the posts cover things I want others to know about. It might be a library I find very useful or a tool I've recently discovered. Other times it's basically me writing a reference for future me after solving a particular problem. A few times I've even dared to add my 2 cents about a particular subject.

The variation isn't so much by design, as it's more of a bi-product of the fact I needed to produce something every ten days. Sometimes the blog post is just bursting to get out, other times I find myself desperately looking for something to write about. This has the funny side effect of where I at one point had two months' worth of blog posts scheduled, but at another time sat writing the blog post the same day it was to be published.

Going forward I'm going to change things up a bit. I'm going to keep posting a set intervals, but it's not going to be every ten days. It's been more work than it's worth just to keep track of which days I'm supposed to post something and the pace is sometimes a bit high. Going forward, starting on the 1st of March, I'm going to post on the 1st and 15th of every month.

Here's to another year.