Writing Blog Posts

Supposedly this month is NaBloPoMo, which means "National Blog Posting Month", where you are supposed to post one article a day for a month. Besides already having failed at it, I'm not sure how I feel about this idea. You shouldn't write a post just for the sake of writing a post, you should have a reason to write it. So I've decided to write about some of the reasons why I post:

1) There's something that interests me. Typically this is something science-y or math-y or computer-y or whatever. This is the #1 reason to post, since you can actually write good articles this way - when you're interested in something, you tend to put a fair bit more effort into the post than you would otherwise. On top of that if something interests you then chances are it will interest other folks, so it's a good way to build up a readership which in turn can give you more ideas through comment feedback, link sharing, etc.

2) I've found some information that I want to share with people. This is usually little updates like FireSheep or little howtos like installing Rubygems on Ubuntu. For the latter it is usually, "I've figured out how to do X with technology Y (ie. Ubuntu, Ruby), it was a pain in the ass so this is how to do it the easy way." Interestingly enough, the traffic generated by these kinds of posts is the majority of the traffic of this blog. This type of post is good if you want a steady stream of traffic and if you feel all warm inside when people leave comments saying "thank you so much!"

3) Jokes I've thought of. These ones are rare since I'm not much of a funny guy, but maybe you can come up with this type of thing more often!

Anyway that pretty much makes up most of my reasons for posting. The final reason is rants, but I think the Internet is full enough of that kind of post, so I won't encourage it here - however I will probably still end up occasionally ranting now and then...

So for those of you wanting to do NaBloPoMo, I hope this helps!