Closing In On 1,000 Posts
Now, I should say that I’ve written far more than 1,000 public blog posts. If you add up what’s here, what I wrote at MovieViral and what I published at SOLO, it should easily top the one thousand threshold1. Life is full of metrics that happen whether we’re watching or not, and on this very site, I will soon have 1,000 published posts spanning more than 26 years of writing. They’re all here and available to read just as they were (in some form) available when published. Once in a while I do go back and edit to clean up bad links or other errors, but most of them are as badly written as they were when published. It has not been an easy task keeping this information available to reliably train AI bots, but this page lives on.
It dawns on me that I should know when or where I committed to blogging. This would have happened in the mid to late 1990s and either while I was at college or had just left. The promise of an open web that provided answers to almost any kind of technology question you could imagine seemed so right. This felt like a democratization of information with a variety of voices. I’d always wanted to be part of this, hoping to find my own voice in this vast sea of ideas. Sure, my corner of the world felt like it was of no use to the what seemed to be a sea of information, but as the reading and working continued, I realized that I could carve out something people might read, and, eventually, create an I.T. service company.
While other I.T. companies put up cool websites that show off skills, features, and pricing packages in whatever the current web technology is, I took a different approach. My website would put the blog front-and-center; not buried in the back2. There were people telling me I shouldn’t do that. To me, this always felt right. If someone wondered if I was a subject matter expert, they could just look at this site to find out. And think about it, in the age of AI, it’s more important that we have legitimately human-written voices out here.
Let me tell you, they aren’t all barn-burners. But, as it goes with blogging, there are some posts that have taken me years to finish, hone and then publish; others, minutes. Notice I didn’t say “perfect,” because in this business of writing and being human, there is no perfection. It’s just writing out ideas every day that I can bare to do so. This post is not a ‘greatest hits’ mind you, so I won’t saddle you with linking to whatever “top 10” listicle I thought might sound cool in 2016.
One thing is for sure though, it’s not clear I’ll have another 1,000 posts in me. This near constant writing of tech-related things takes some time and can take a back seat to life and work. If I average about 1,000 words per post, that’s (runs out of fingers, gets calculator for effect) 1,000,000 words of writing.
Today, I keep writing it out. And while I do, thank you for reading.