Blog, why do I do it?
Should I scream out "for absolutely no reason!"? :p Actually, sometimes I do wonder why I continue to blog. In the old days, before blogging was a buzz-word and you didn’t have all the blogging sites and blogging tools, I remember that I hand coded my blog in DreamWeaver. I was hosted on Tripod at that time and that first Paleolithic blog actually served a purpose. I was doing LiteStep development at that point and since I was the sole developer on the project at that point, I used my blog (it wasn’t called a blog then – I don’t know if the term had been coined by then :p) to keep LiteStep users informed as to what was going on with development.
Then I left the LiteStep project and started my own break-away project, DarkStep. And the blog continued so that people can see what was going on with DarkStep, download new builds and so on. I believe these development blogs continued from 1999 till about 2000 – though I can’t be totally certain of the time frames now 🙂 In March of 2001, I think I first became aware of the actual concept of blogging and wanted to give it a go since it was suddenly the rage :p I think I set up a Blogger account as the first step and used it for about a week. I became tired of the constant service outages and the fact that sometimes I’d post an entry but it would not get published due to date/time inconsistencies or some other junk like that.
I believe I wanted to try GreyMatter at this point but Tripod would not let me run perl scripts at that point (not sure if does now). So I looked around a little bit longer for a good blogging alternative but didn’t find anything which did everything that I wanted. So, I decided to write my own and so, Blog was born :p So what with my development work on Blog and other software I was developing and all the users who were interested to know what was going on, there was actually a need for a blog and I kept the blog going. In fact, by this time the original blog on Tripod had developed two other mirrors courtesy of a couple of kind people who liked my development work 🙂
Eventually, the blog became such a tightly integrated part of my schedule and I was blogging about so many things both about day-to-day life stuff and coding related stuff, that I decided to create another blog for the personal stuff and keep the main blog limited to coding related issues. So, I created Solipsistic Meanderings – the main blog was called The Developer’s Corner at that time. The first instance of SM ran on Movable Type but I was writing my entries in an alternate version of Blog that I called BlogMan and was publishing via XMLRPC. After a while, I switched to WordPress when MovableType went commercial and BlogMan became integrated into Blog itself. Then life got really busy and my freeware coding slowed down and even SM went into a sort of hibernation for a while.
When SM finally did come out of its hibernation, I realized that maintaining two blogs was just too much hassle and so I combined The Developer’s Corner and Solipsistic Meandering back into one blog :p Yes, it’s been quite a long journey and in many forms. There were needs for this blog at certain points because it served a purpose. Now, I simply write because I want to. I don’t really know how many people read it any longer. I know some of the old readers from the days gone by still hang out here but most of my traffic seems to come from Google hits :p I sometimes wonder if there is a need for a blog any longer but since I enjoy writing it, I keep going 🙂
I still read it!