The catch-22 of this blog... »

So I've been thinking a little bit about why I do this blog thing and what I really get out of it.

For the most part I do it for a handful of personal reasons...in no particular order (and probably not all that complete of a list) I started it

...to stay active with writing in hopes of eventually doing another book.

...to gather a log of my random thoughts, ideas, and experience that I might be able to use as a starting point for some future book project.

...to attempt to help others that are searching for various solutions to problems I've also hit in my day to day work.

...to keep a handful of my friends and family (who are spread around the country) up to date on what I'm doing.

As it turns out I've also already seen a few unexpected benefits from doing this blog in the past 6 months or so - the primary one being that I use it a lot just to look up my own code examples and explanations and to peek back at what I was thinking when tackling various issues.

So overall I'm pretty happy with the experience...and I plan to continue...as a matter of fact, I hope to get much better at it.

Which brings me to my original thought for tonights post...in hopes of learning what things are worth writing about, I've been digging into google analytics and what keywords and things people are using to stumble onto this very blog.

The interesting thing that I'm finding is that, because I'm sort of all over the place, the keywords people are using is also all over the place...and almost all are related to my 'tech' posts (nobody stumbles here because of posts like this very one)...

So you would think from reading the logs, I should probably just do pure tech posts all the time...but I don't think that's really what I'm going to do...

1. It's really hard to write a tech post a day (btw, I try to post at least once day...and I've already scaled it down to a goal of at least once a day during the week)...anyway writing the tech posts takes a lot of time to really explain things the way I want (and usually even the end product is not what I wanted it to be).

2. Even though people are finding this blog because of those tech keyword searches, I believe they are almost all 1 timers...they are looking for a specific solution and once they find it (well really weather they find it or not), they are gone for ever. They are not going to subscribe to the rss feed or become reg. readers...I know because I'm the same way, and I do the same thing on hundreds of blogs each week as I search for solutions to my own problems...

Still, I think writing tech posts is the real 'meat' of my blog....but I also hope to eventually find a voice that is entertaining and relevant enough to build a real readership as well...you know find the fine line between both worlds and walk it as well as possible.

So stay tuned to see how it goes