On Blogging

At work we’ve started a blogging group. (Side note – who remembers BlogRings? Ah the good old days…)

Seeing as we create website/blogging software for a living, it seems fitting a group of us should be regularly wine-tasting the product and seeing how it goes.

I’ve just started a new blog about accidentally discovering I’m into plants, but it’s made me think more about my history/past of blogging and trying to consider why I’ve done it. And why I should do it.

Inception: with a personal blog

Back when I was studying Digital Media at TAFE (way to long ago to mention) I started tinkering with the idea of a blog. I was using Movable Type and knew enough to be dangerous. I wrote about the things that were VERY important to me as someone in their early twenties: My bad photography, and music. All the music.

I even went so far as to have a side-blog called ‘Whitenoise’ where I created 640 x 480 pixel images of song quotes. All. The. Music.

Transition: moving to WordPress

In 2004 Movable Type transitioned to requiring a paid license – which meant I had to look for another platform. I stumbled across WordPress at the time – I think I must have started at about v1.2.2.

I was pretty excited about the customization/extensibility and was very quickly trying to create/customize my own themes. It was (I suppose) my way of a little self-expression – but it was never really about the ‘writing’ itself.

But the key victory was it introduced me to WordPress – which I now get to work with full time.

Informative: Keeping folks up to date

When we got married, my wife and I decided it would be good to have a blog to keep friends/family updated. This escalated severely when we moved overseas and it became more important to keep people in the loop.

These were all small updates – and a lot of photos. Nothing particularly interesting when it came to writing – more just making sure people knew what was happening.

Promotional: Drumming up freelance work

When we returned to live in Australia in 2009 I struck out as a freelance web designer/developer and all of a sudden, blogging became much more important.

I would blog about recent work, along with things I was finding interesting (like the start of Responsive Design). I was writing a lot more at this stage – and generally with a little more focus.

Pictorial: Photos of the kids

Once our kids joined us – the focus was on keeping folks updated again. But this time there were lots of photos.In fact at this stage there was almost no writing at all (save for some captions and a brief introduction).

Promotional (again): Finding a Niche

As I spent more time freelancing I found a niche creating websites for churches. This opened an opportunity to start building a reputation as an expert in the field – so my writing got a LOT more focused at this time.

There’s still a few remnants of these posts around the place – and looking back they’re not the best, but they did the trick. Having a specific niche proved to be very helpful – and I did some of my best writing at this time.

Personal: here we are then…

And that brings me to this blog… When I started at Automattic I had to shut down all my previous freelance work. I decided to start this blog in order to write about whatever I felt like that.

So it’s a bit of a mish-mash. I spent so long with a purpose/focus of writing that I’m almost not sure what to write about. My new project is once again VERY focused – so it seems that will help in some respects – but that still leaves this blog.

I’m going to work on continuing to write more personal stuff here – and keep it varied. I guess we’ll see how that goes. I’d really like to become a better writer – and the trick with that seems to be to just keep on doing it.

What about you?

So I’d be interested to know… Why do you blog?