Several years ago, I set myself a goal to blog at least once a week. At the time, it was relatively easy to do so. I have not only this blog, but also my family blog. Now that my kids have gotten older, they don’t like me blogging on the family blog so much, so that has become more difficult. Historically, this blog has focused mostly on computer stuff, and I am not as interested in technology as I used to be, which has made it more difficult for me to blog here as well. Today I need to write a blog post, or fail my goal (which means I need to pay beeminder.com money). So here I am, writing a blog post. While I was in the shower this morning I thought about what I should write about. I still have a couple blog posts to write on the family blog about our vacation to Madeira, but writing those is quite time consuming, because it involves selecting and editing a lot of pictures. So instead I decided to write more of a meta-blogging post about why I blog at all.
Back when I started this blog in 2006, I was very excited about web development and learning to program. My friend Luis suggested I start a blog, because that was a hot trend back then. I decided to give it a try, and have stuck with it. Pretty much from the start, I adopted the philosophy that my audience is mostly the future Robert Felty. That is, when I find something interesting or find a solution to a problem, I write it down, so that when I encounter something similar in the future, I know where to find the solution. I am pretty certain that I am the most avid reader of my blog. There are computer issues I routinely face several times per year. The one that always comes to mind is when I want to write a perl one-liner which requires using a regular expression that goes across line boundaries. Normally for regex I use grep, sed or awk, but these all operate line by line. If I need to use a regular expression which crosses line boundaries, I need to use perl, and “slurp” the whole file in at once. I can almost never remember the exact syntax of how to do this. However, I know that all I need to do is search for “perl slurp” on my blog, and I immediately find the answer.
One might ask – if I am the only person who reads my blog, why blog at all? Why not just keep a private journal? Well, I have always thought that other people might find my blog posts useful as well. The best example of this was an early post I made about how to convert a dryer from natural gas to propane. I did end up referring to that post again several years after I made it when I needed to convert back from propane to natural gas. But in the interim, many other people found it useful. I took basically the same approach with the WordPress plugins I have developed. I developed them for me, but made them public, because other people might find them useful as well. Occasionally I got some donations which was nice, but mostly I was just doing it for myself, not for money.
Lately I have been posting a bit more philosophical oriented content. I don’t think I will refer back to it as often as I do technical content, but I can imagine that in 20 years, it might be interesting to see what I was thinking about today. And who knows, maybe my philosophizing will also be of interest to someone other than my future self.