For my first post here I think I’ll talk a bit about the motivation behind this blog and they types of content it will likely contain.
The main motivating force behind this has been Dave Winer’s blog (and the thought’s therein). I started following his blog a year or so ago and really liked the style of simply posting comments throughout the day about various topics or thoughts on current events or what he was working on. I also like the idea of textcasting and connecting the web with RSS.
I’ve been a big user of RSS since the Google Reader (RIP) days. But I primarily followed commercial websites rather than blogs run by individuals. With many of the sites I used to follow either shutting down or getting eaten up by private equity, I had largely stopped following anything.
I started following some newsletters over the last year and quickly realized that reading in an email app is not great so I started converting any that were not paid over to RSS. That started to get me back into the RSS game and back to Dave’s site which has an excellent blogroll that helped me begin to fill up my RSS list again. I had never been a Twitter user but decided to check out Mastodon when Musk bought twitter. That led me into the wider Fediverse and indie web where I found even more personal blogs to follow.
Seeing how different people share the things in their life that interest them or that they are working on or that they are working through was a nice way to connect with others and has made the internet feel more social for me. It’s also started to get me thinking about doing the same. This type of writing seems like it has the potential to be therapeutic in the same way journaling can be. It’s a way to force you to think through a topic and if you’re lucky you may get some valuable feedback from anyone who reads it or you may help them with something they are thinking about.
My background is in software development. My main hobbies (outside of raising 2 children) are reading, photography and enjoying the outdoors. So these are likely the topics I will mostly be writing about here.
Hopefully I’ll stick with this and over time come up with a good cadence of publishing and find a good voice as I’ve not really written anything outside of technical documentation for work since college.