With the start of another year, and the dawn of a new era for the world, this seems like a good time to restart my blog. But this time, I will do so with a commitment to myself. It’s time to get past the excuses I have so easily found in the past and begin to write entries for my blog.

For a long while, I believed that content was the most important aspect of a blog. I became stuck on the idea that I needed to write incredibly thought provoking entries and ended up writing nothing. However, if you don’t write something, then there will never be anything written. (This sounds incredibly obvious as I write it down, but hey, I wrote it down.) This has led me to the conclusion that a new methodology for writing blog entries is needed. As a result, there may be an overwhelming multitude of smaller entries interspersed by a few larger entries. As long as I keep the flow going, though, I hope that I will find the resolve to continue this for a long time to come.

My decision to start blogging again was spurred from many sources. While working on various projects, I have discovered that most of the time, I find almost all of the answers I need within blogs. I’ve been using blogs long enough now, without contributing, that I feel it is my turn to give a little back. One day, I stumbled across a question on StackOverflow that hit home: How can you tell whether you’re ready to start your own blog?. After reading that, I knew that I had to make the time and get started, regardless of work schedule. Waiting for work to quiet down was only going to delay it even more.

I picked a schedule for posting after following a little advice from an entry by Jeff Atwood, How To Achieve Ultimate Blog Success In One Easy Step:

When people ask me for advice on blogging, I always respond with yet another form of the same advice: pick a schedule you can live with, and stick to it. Until you do that, none of the other advice I could give you will matter. I don’t care if you suck at writing. I don’t care if nobody reads your blog. I don’t care if you have nothing interesting to say. If you can demonstrate a willingness to write, and a desire to keep continually improving your writing, you will eventually be successful.

The personal posting schedule that I am going to strive for is at least one post per week. I can only imagine that at the beginning there will be a series of small ‘testing the water’ posts as I attempt to get my blog looking like I want. I also would hazard a guess that some (or a lot) of my grammar will be malformed and a few spellings will be wrong. My writing skills have gotten a little rusty, but through continued perseverance, I hope to improve that.

Finding and getting ideas out may be a little difficult at the onset since I’m not sure what to write about or where to start. To achieve this, I’ve thought up a couple of ideas that I believe will help me to find the quantity of ideas I need to get started. First, I’m going to keep a small notebook beside my bed so that as I’m falling asleep, I can write down any ideas that come to mind. I have a tendency to become more reflective just before I become too tired to think. Second, if I’m at work and I think of an idea or solve a problem that I think would make a good post, I’m going to send a small email reminder to myself to jog my mind later. A filter that checks for a specific word in the subject and tags the email appropriately would probably be very useful for this. I don’t have any free (or flexible/20%) time at my busy current job, so I won’t be writing any blog entries during those hours. If the topic specifically applies to work and I get approval to write a blog entry on company hours, I’ll tag or denote the post in some obvious way in the interest of full disclosure.