On Starting a Blog

Why a blog?

For practice writing. In particular, to practice releasing written communication that I do not feel is perfect—or fully right, maybe even sometimes good enough.

Also, as a place to put long-form ideas—stuff that is too long, or obscure, for social media platforms.

Expectations

Target audience

Me. Mostly. If I write something up, and think it would be useful to someone, I might share a link to that article with that person. And anyone else that finds their way to it and (hopefully) finds something useful.

Content

Varied.

• I may get to writing up some thoughts on God, and what Jesus has done for me.
• I might write about World Vision, and the incredible work God is doing through them—community development; WAter Sanitation and Hygiene; humanitarian crisis response.
• Maybe some thoughts on/from foster care (if I can suitably anonymize them).
• Definitely tech stuff
• Project or task writeups
• “Bookmarks” with notes-to-self
• Links to stuff I am working on or with
• Long form project descriptions for inclusion in my LinkedIn profile where the project does not have a public web presence
• Feature requests/ux "bug" reports/frustrations/etc. that will never get looked at for products that I use
• Once I have them in writing, I might even submit them through the proper channels (It should be easy at that point, right? If I can find said "proper channel")
• Career/ Professional development / Personal development brain dump, as much as for actually planning/documentation
• Goals
• Milestones
• Progress
• Musings
• etc.

Should be interesting (at least to me) to see what unfolds.

Cadence

Erratic. Probably bursty.

Quality

I am explicitly setting no quality standards for myself with this project. I may come back to posts and update them. I may provide follow up posts. But I also might not. Even if the initial deliverable was not great.

Availability

Not guaranteed. Not even close. The blog may be used as an experimentation target for me at any time (replatforming? git-blogging? DNS fun?) and I intend to retain that flexibility for the foreseeable future.

Why not one of the existing platforms

Because I would put a higher burden of quality on my work if posting it on the platforms with content of a caliber that I want to consume it.

“I am too much of a perfectionist” is often ridiculed as the non-answer to the interview question “what is your biggest weakness?” But not for me. I truly struggle with producing “good-enough” content. I can spend hours on an email that might take others 5 minutes. Granted, a lot of that time could actually be attributed to thinking through the project behind the email and planning next steps; some time definitely goes to overthinking word choice, grammar, or document format; more time often goes into making sure all the relevant information is included to reduce the likelihood that the content cannot be misunderstood, misinterpreted, or misapplied; still more time often goes into cutting back the content to minimize it to increase the chance that it is actually read by the recipient; some of the time is because I am slow (diagnosed digital-symbol processing learning difference)—cannot necessarily change that, but hopefully practice on the other areas can help compensate and generally improve my communication overall.

Also, blog setup seems to be the right-of-passage “hello world” sys-admin project. While I have been multi-hatting as a sys admin for years, there are certain technical experiments that I hope to get to that are too risky for production systems, but have not captured my attention without a public facing presence (even if it is just a one-reader blog). But I do not intend to do the traditional sys-admin “hello world” self-hosted wordpress instance turned abandonware. So I will start with Blogger as the tech stack.