It’s My First Blogiversary
Published Sunday, March 26th, 2006 at 1:00 am
The new hypercubed blog that emerged is a lot more satisfying. I started posting links to cool sites I discovered around the web. These really filled up my posting queue and allowed me to achieve nearly a post a day. These days I’m not so fixated on a post a day so you instead get the links of the week. This was a great move on my part as it allows me to post more links without worrying about how to relate the topic to my own experiences. I even dabbled into a few skeptical type articles but it is hard to keep up with the greats skeptical bloggers (Pharyngula and Skeptico for example). Their skills at spotting logical fallacies are by far superior to my own. I’ve provided a few applications and book reviews. Overall I hope my sarcastic sense of humor was shown through-out these posts.
By far my favorite are the hacks, fixes, and tips. The posts are where something wasn’t working or wasn’t working the way I wanted so I fixed it. I’ve always been doing these type of things but finally I found a medium to efficiently share my experiences. I feel quite satisfied being able to share these with others. These also end up being my most popular posts. One example is a fix for a WordPress 2.0 bug that prevented WP from running on windows machines (fixed in WP 2.0.1 version thanks to my bug report). I shared my method for hiding the WordPress post preview. I discovered a fix for a problem debugging Visual Studio applications with .NET 2.0 runtime installed. I also used my blog to spread the word of my first Firefox extension.
What I find interesting about this type of blogging is that I don’t really build up a loyal readership. Hypercubed blog has become slightly popular with approximately 300 – 400 people a day (unique IP addresses) wandering through (although I cannot tell the spammers from the readers). However, it appears from my statistics that most of those people never return. Maybe someone is drawn to my blog because of an interesting skeptical post but when they return they get a bunch of technical posts that they are not interested in. Or perhaps people that wonder in for a specific technical post are there to read about that particular issue. They have no need to return. In essences I’m violating the #1 rule of blogging. Pick a topic and stick to it. But you know what? I really don’t care. I’m enjoying it and I’m sharing with others. This is the way I wanted it to be back in 1996 when I started my first website Labtek’s Laboratory.