Blogging in 2018. Blogs, How Do They Work?

I started this blog in a different form around 2000. I was in college and loved writing posts about my life.

I remember graduating from college in 2001 and having a regular habit of updating my blog. It was one of the main ways I stayed in touch with those who I left in various locales. Whether it was family in Colorado or friends in Iowa - my blog was one of the better ways we connected.

I wrote my first blog software in 2000 in PHP. It had templates and generated static HTML. I ditched that for greymatter for a bit. Then I rewrote everything to be dynamic PHP. I ran that for a few years and kept adding features and features and features. After awhile, it didn’t make sense to keep building on it and I migrated to Wordpress. I ran on Wordpress for a few more years. Then twitter happened.

Twitter killed my blogging. It wasn’t Myspace, Friendster or Facebook. It was twitter. The feeling I got from blogging was replaced by the short spurts of a similar feeling from posting a tweet. In retrospect, it wasn’t better. It wasn’t a lot worse either. ;)

Around this same time, my career really started to take off and I became much busier. I also tried to be a bit more professional (lol). I wanted to make sure that any blog posts I was writing were actually worth reading. I think that this is a mistake.

I do not put that much thought into twitter. I just write stupid stuff into the box. I should do that here - just with more characters.

Since twitter, I have re-platformed my blog 3 times. Once to Jekyll and App Engine. Once to Jekyll running at the domain nata2.org on s3. Once to this current domain running Jekyll on Github. and most recently to Hugo and Github.

I still have the “I should write a post about this” muscle. I am often thinking about things to write. I have kept a list for years. Here is a few of my potential posts:

• How to sell a slightly used and battered company
• Things I learned from being a founder
• Home automation thoughts
• My photo work flow
• My travel gear
• Obviously some posts on books i have read
• Some travel blogs

Even with the list, I never really got very far. I have a few starts started and a couple that are a bit more fleshed out. Nothing is completely written. I may dust them off, update them and post them. I would like that.

I am going to make a concerted effort to post some #content. It am even going to try and schedule myself to do it. My brother, Dylan Reed, has done a good job of updating various blogs and writing projects and it seems that his strategy of scheduling helps a lot. I will try that.

In an effort to kick start my blog, I have restructured this site. I created a new space for the old legacy content. I moved all of my old posts to /archives/ (They are hilarious - especially the ones from the early 2000s). In doing so I freed up some space for me to create new posts.

Let’s see how it goes…