Old Tin Roof

A little bit of me, and everything else

Ideas of March

Today while catch­ing up with my read­ing on my favourite feed reader I came across a post by Jon Tan. It’s part of a move­ment encour­ag­ing peo­ple to fire up their blogs and try to post more reg­u­larly through­out March and onwards, with a view to pro­mote more thor­ough dis­course online rather than just 140 char­ac­ters in a tweet. Twit­ter is not an enemy to blog­ging, if any­thing it should encour­age more dis­cus­sion, with peo­ple actu­ally writ­ing out what their rea­son­ing is behind their orig­i­nal message.

Chris Shi­flett was the cat­a­lyst for the Ideas of March, and is ask­ing peo­ple to:

  • Write a post called Ideas of March.
  • List some of the rea­sons you like blogs.
  • Pledge to blog more the rest of the month.
  • Share your thoughts on Twit­ter with the #idea­sof­march hashtag.

So, here goes…

Why I love blogs

Over the past 7 years or so, I’ve kept a steady 50–60 blogs in my feed reader, all of which sup­ply me with a vari­ety of infor­ma­tion, enter­tain­ment, and encour­age­ment.  There are a num­ber of rea­sons for this ded­i­ca­tion to these blogs:

  • With­out blogs I wouldn’t have gained the sort of expe­ri­ence, and level of tech­ni­cal knowl­edge that now sup­ports me on a daily basis;
  • It’s great to get someone’s thoughts & rea­son­ing behind a short sta­tus update or a tweet;
  • I’ve often stum­bled across a new blog through a post by some­one I already read, and found some great con­tent I would never have found otherwise;
  • As other peo­ple share their wis­dom, knowl­edge and links, I’ve built up a much bet­ter under­stand­ing of sub­jects that I wouldn’t even know where to start with normally.

My pledge

Almost exactly a year has passed since I wrote the oblig­a­tory first post on this blog.  It was at a time when I needed to update the con­tent and design of this site, mostly to help secure more con­tract work and sup­port my CV with some imparted wis­dom.  Look­ing back, I had great inten­tions and ideas, but never  really ful­filled them, both through apa­thy and not really know­ing what to write.

This should hope­fully encour­age me to write the posts I have planned on a vari­ety of sub­jects, and I’m hop­ing it’ll help me to ratio­nalise a lot of my think­ing.  With­out doubt it’ll also help my writ­ing skills too.

So due to the rea­sons above and (a lot) more, I’m going to try my best to write more, more often, and join in the con­ver­sa­tion where I can.