100th Blog Entry – First Year of Real Blogging

This is my 100th entry into my blog, and 25 days before my first year mark for writing on my blog. It’s been a great experience, and I’m starting to see some real traffic. I’ve found that publishing meaningful content, whether a simple bug fix, or a full blown tutorial, can be very satisfying. Seeing the handful of thankful comments has been great, and even the contentious comments have been fun.

I thought I’d write some of my thoughts on my impressions of my first year of blogging. I’ve tried to blog several times before, wrote maybe three or four entries, and then never used it again. I think one of the reasons I had so many problems was that I spent the majority of my time setting up my blog, verses using my blog. I spent the majority of the time tweaking my blog, customizing themes, installing plugins, that I kinda burnt out before I even got writing.

This time I set up the blog, picked a theme, and then started writing. I slowly made changes to the theme and plugins over time, instead of a huge up-front investment into making the blog. Another big difference is before I was blogging with the idea of becoming this big programming blogger. My focus was on “what can I do to drive the most traffic?” This time around, my focus has been on “what do I want to write about and share today?” There hasn’t been this huge concern about generating a huge audience. The irony is that when I started to focus on blogging for myself, the more traffic I got. The more meaningful my entries, the more people liked them.

Some months I had lots of creative juices and wrote 15+ articles a month. However, when I got really busy, or just didn’t feel inspired, I didn’t let it get to me. Only 2 posts in a month? Oh well, it isn’t the end of the world. When I had this attitude, I ended up not feeling guilty about not writing, and the next month or so I would write more.

The year 2009 holds lots of potential, as a blogger, a developer, and an entrepreneur. Dating DNA, my current full time project, is going very well. We’ve had our ups and downs, but we’ve been able to do a whole lot with very little. I think we’re very close to exploding with user sign-ups. CEVO has been going very well, and I’ve been able to help move them to a more robust infrastructure. I’ve been enjoying my time with the Utah PHP Usergroup, and gave a presentation this last month. I thought it went really well.

Only time will tell, and while the country might be in a recession, I think the future looks very bright.

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