I am working on relaunching this blog soon. Probably for about the 5th time!
Having somehow managed to keep backups of my old blog safe since 2005, I was having a read through the old posts only to find that, to be perfectly honest with myself, 95% of what I was writing about was total rubbish and not worth keeping backups of - never mind restoring into this incarnation of the pheonix!
In order to hopefully motivate myself to keep the blog going properly this time, I am setting myself some ground rules:-
1. No rants
Probably one of the worst things I do online is get dragged into pointless rants and arguments and shoving my 2p worth into the mix on various topics, which often are barely related to the things I know about. I’ll hammer out my non-expert opinion and hit the publish button faster than the flash only to return a few days later with a much more rational mindset and re-read what I had written to realise I sounded just like the arseholes I was ranting against!
In order to help myself improve the quality of what I am writing, I am going to actually make it impossible to write and publish an article within 24 hours.
One of the advantages of writing your own software, is you can make up whatever logic rules you like. I’m going to make publishing a two step process; first, I’ll trigger a timer to start, then I can only “publish” an article once the timer reaches a minimim of 24 hours.
2. Stay “close” to what I know
I’m a Hacker (in the true sense, not the Holywood sense), a Software Developer, a Sys Admin… a DevOps. I know PHP, Linux, Basic web security. These are the things I know most about, and are the topics I can provide the most useful information about (hopefully). So this is what I am going to stay close to. I say “close to”, because part of the fun of hacking and blogging is to explore new stuff, find out how things work and share the things you learn. It wouldn’t be much fun if I ONLY wrote about developing PHP applications.
Hopefully, I’ll be sharing some interesting and useful information as I learn about new ideas and technologies and how they fit into the DevOps stuff that I already know about.
3. Take my time (Learn from others)
The other thing I have noticed about my old posts from the backups - I wrote virtually all of them in one sitting. I’ll have an idea for a post, or come across something new and immediately brain fart it into a post!
I’ve been reading a lot of posts from Troy Hunt and Scott Helme over the few years. Both of whome are extremely good writers. It’s clear to see from their writings that many of their posts are the result of several days, weeks or even months of research and work.
I’m going to take inspiration from this, and aim for just one good post per month.