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Fall Update
Nov 16, 2009 Uncategorized 1 Comment
What do you mean fall is practically over? I know, I know. I really haven’t forgotten about the blog. I was walking to my car last week and it was snowing and I thought, “hey it’s freezing, what happened to all of those nice cool days of fall?” Then I realized, I’ve worked right through it. Work has been crazy for the last few months and we’ve still got a few more weeks to go. Looks like those projects that I’ve been wanting to do before winter aren’t going to get done… oh well.
Since so much time has passed since my last entry, I’ve had a lot of time to think. I’ve decided that I want to redesign this blog. I’m just using a template that I found somewhere, and while I like it, it isn’t entirely unique. I expected that because it is a template, but I think I’d like to do something that’s all my own. I do have “ideas”. Don’t expect it anytime soon though, because my ideas are pretty crazy and I don’t really have the time for that right now.
I did also come up with a new idea for an iPhone App. I’ve already started putting together a prototype for that one. I’m not going to give away any details on that just yet, but I hope to have that finished up in a month or so, would be sooner if my job would let up a bit.
Anyway, consider the silence broken.
Aug 18, 2009 Technology Leave a comment
I was going to write this whole big post about how I never liked or understood Twitter and how I only checked it out because I felt it was part of my responsibility as a web developer to keep on top of the trends of what is currently popular on the Internet and blah blah blah…
I won’t bore you with any of that. The short version is, I didn’t understand it then but now I’m a fan, simply because a lot of the time I don’t have enough to say to fill up a whole blog post anyway. Since a Twitter post is limited to 140 characters, it forces everyone to just get to the point and I like that. I really like that. I added my Twitter feed to this site a while ago for those of you that don’t have a Twitter account. For those of you that do, follow me here: http://twitter.com/rminnick
Popularity
Jul 30, 2009 Thoughts 2 Comments
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, blogging is hard (for me anyway). I’ve read a lot of articles about blogging and how hard it is to make a living as a blogger and all the tips and tricks and guidelines to make it work. I don’t worry about it too much because honestly I didn’t ever hope that I’d be able to quit my day job because of this blog.
I follow a lot of different blogs, and I was recently noticing that one blog in particular – not going to name names – has not posted a single thing this whole year (which is particularly annoying because there is no RSS feed so I have to manually go check the site for new posts). Looking a little further I saw that there were only 3 posts in 2008, 5 in 2007, 4 in 2006, 8 in 2005 and 18 in 2004. In 2003 there were 34 posts, which is a more “acceptable” level of posts by blogging standards, but even that many is less than 1 per week and that was over 5 years ago! The blog in question is still considered to be pretty popular and even scored the owner a book deal and corresponding book tour. So how is it that a blog with such a shoddy track record became so popular? My guess is that it’s just plain dumb luck. Someone in the right place at the right time by pure coincidence. I was watching an interview with a software developer recently where attributing his success he says he “stumbled into a big steaming pile of gold”. I think that sums it up nicely.
I know there are bloggers out there that really work at what they do, and there are also those who really work at it AND have a bit of luck to kick them up the ranks. Then there’s me, who doesn’t really do either of those. But I’ve got the making a few sporadic posts per year part down, so I’m ready for the dumb luck and a book deal part. Who am I kidding, I don’t have enough to say to fill up a book. At least there’s no pressure on me to blog more often.