Blog Post #300

I signed off My 200th Blog Post in November 2014 with the following words:

See you again in a few years.

At the time I didn’t think it would take me over 5 years to write another 100 blog posts, but it has. Does this mean I’ve stopped writing and gone back to coding, reading, and gaming more on my daily commute? No, the clue is also in that blog post:

My main aspiration was that writing this blog would help me sharpen my writing skills and give me the confidence to go and write something more detailed that might then be formally published.

No, I haven’t stopped writing; on the contrary, since my first “proper” [1] article for ACCU in late 2013 I’ve spent far more of my time writing further articles, somewhere around the 60 mark at the last count. These have often been longer and also required more care and attention but I’ve probably still written a similar amount of words in the last five years to the previous five.

Columnist

My “In The Toolbox” column for C Vu was a regular feature from 2013 to 2016 but that has tailed off for now and been replaced by a column on the final page of ACCU’s Overload. After it’s editor Frances Buontempo suggested the title “Afterwood” in the pub one evening how could I not accept?

In my very first Afterwood, where I set out my stall, I described how the final page of a programming journal has often played host to some entertaining writers in the past (when printed journals were still all the rage) and, while perhaps a little late to the party given the demise of the printed page, I’m still glad to have a stab at attempting such a role.

This 300th blog post almost coincided with the blog’s 10th anniversary 9 months ago but I had a remote working contract at the time so my long anticipated “decade of writing” blog post was elevated to an Afterwood instead due to the latter having some semblance of moral obligation unlike the former [2]. That piece, together with this one which focuses more on this blog, probably forms the whole picture.

Statistics

I did wonder if I’d ever get bored of seeing my words appear in print and so far I haven’t; it still feels just that little bit more special to have to get your content past some reviewers, something you don’t have with your own blog. Being author and editor for my blog was something I called out as a big plus in my first anniversary post, “Happy Birthday, Blog”. 

Many of us programmers aren’t as blessed in the confidence department as people in some other disciplines so we often have to find other ways to give ourselves that little boost every now and then. The blog wins out here as you can usually see some metrics and even occasionally the odd link back from other people’s blogs or Stack Overflow, which is a nice surprise. (Metrics only tell you someone downloaded the page, whereas a link back is a good indication they actually read it too :o). They may also have agreed, which would be even more satisfying!)

While we’re on the subject of “vanity” metrics I’ve remained fairly steadfast and ignored them. I did include a monthly “page views”counter on the sidebar just to make sure that it hadn’t got lost in the ether, search-engine wise. It’s never been easy searching for my own content; I usually have to add “site:chrisoldwood.blogspot.com” into the query, but it’s not that big an issue as first-and-foremost it’s notes for myself, other readers are always a bonus. For a long time my posts about PowerShell exit codes (2011) and Subversion mergeinfo records (2010) held the top spots but for some totally unknown reason my slightly ranty post around NTLM HTTP proxies (2016) is now dominating and will likely take over the top spot. Given there are no links to it (that I can find) I can only imagine it turns up in search engine queries and it’s not what people are really looking for. Sorry about that! Maybe there are devs and sysadmins out there looking for NTLM HTTP proxy therapy and this page is it? :o) Anyway, here are the top posts as of today:

Somewhat amusingly the stats graph on my 200th blog post shows a sudden meteoric rise in page views. Was I suddenly propelled to stardom? Of course not. It just so happened that my most recent post at the time got some extra views after the link was retweeted by a few people who’s follower count is measured in the thousands. It happened again a couple of years later, but in between it’s sat around the 4,500 views / month from what I can tell.

The 1 million views mark is still some way off, probably another 2.5 years, unless I manage to write something incredibly profound before then. (I won’t hold my breath though as 10 years of sample data must be statistically valid and it hasn’t happened so far.)

The Future

So, what for the future? Hopefully I’m going to keep plodding along with both my blog and any other outlets that will accept my written word. I have 113 topics in my blog drafts folder so I’m not out of ideas just yet. Naturally many of those should probably be junked as my opinion has undoubtedly changed in the meantime, although that in itself is something to write about which is why I can’t bring myself to bin them just yet – there is still value there, somewhere.

Two things I have realised I’ve missed, due to spending more time writing, is reading books (both technical and fiction) and writing code outside of work, i.e. my free tools. However, while I’ve sorely missed both of these pursuits I have in no way regretted spending more time writing as software development is all about communication and therefore it was a skill that I felt I definitely needed to improve. My time can hardly be considered wasted.

Now that I feel I’ve reached an acceptable level of competency in my technical writing I’m left wondering whether I’m comfortable sticking with that or whether I should try and be more adventurous. Books like The Goal show that technical subjects can presented in more entertaining ways and I’m well aware that my writing is still far too dry. My suspicion is that I need to get back to reading more fiction, and with a more critical eye, before I’ll truly feel confident enough to branch out more regularly into other styles [3].

Where I signed off my 200th post with a genuine expectation that I’d be back again for my 300th I’m less sure about the future. Not that I’ll have given up writing, more that I’m less sure this blog will continue to be the place where I express myself most. Here’s to the next 100 posts.


[1] I wrote a few reviews of branch meetings and book reviews before then, but that didn’t feel quite the same to me as writing about technical aspects of the craft itself. The latter felt like you were exposing more of your own thoughts rather than “simply” recording the opinions of others.

[2] See “Missing the Daily Commute by Train” about why my volume of writing is highly correlated with where I’m working at the time.

[3] To date my efforts to be more adventurous have been limited to my Afterwood left-pad spoof “Knocked for Six” and the short poem “Risk-a-Verse”.