Experience The Joys Of Blog Maintenance

 

My friend Brian asked for the rules of blogging and I thought about what kind of answer to give because the comment could be seen as serious, insouciant or otherwise.

I expect he’ll understand my reflecting on the meaning of his comment and appreciate how a fellow storyteller likes to dig into how people communicate.

It is not always about snark, sarcasm or trying to prop ourselves by demeaning and diminishing others. Sometimes it is just looking at the layers and letters.

Some might not appreciate that or enjoy expanding your vocabulary with words you’ll rarely use but this blogging thing isn’t for everyone.

The Joy Of Not Knowing

This is all stream of consciousness but if you ask me about the joy of not knowing I would tell you about it and how it leads to the nirvana of knowledge.

Sounds sort of hokey but if you are someone who enjoys learning about stuff there is joy in education. We are not talking about the kind where you regurgitate information without understanding or appreciation.

This is tied into learning things that light a fire in your belly, stuff that ignites passion.

It is a subjective question, what drives your passion and makes you crave more information.

Ask me to list those items and I’ll give you a long list of things I wish to know more about. I’ll tell you I want to live to be at least a 1,000 because I’ll need that long to explore being a doctor, scientist, teacher, writer and musician.

I’ll tell you I want to take time to build cars, planes and trains. I want to tinker with them all, test different configurations and see what works best.

Give me time and I’ll talk about learning how to work with wood and discuss my appreciation of real craftsmen.

With a good 300 years to work with I figure I might have a decent shot at solving some major diseases and maybe come up with very fine wine or beer.

And let’s not forget how much time could be devoted to writing and the tales that could be told, so much to do and so little time to do it in.

Experience The Joys Of Blog Maintenance

After almost eleven years of blogging and almost 10,000 posts there are lots of things that need to be done around the blog to make sure it runs as I would like it to.

There are posts that aren’t formatted as I wish, links that no longer work and an assortment of other odds and ends to be tended to.

Every time I start to dig into it I find myself feeling a mix of joy, embarrassment and frustration.

There are posts that I am proud of, ones that make me cringe and plugins that suddenly stop working. Sometimes they do so with little affect upon the blog and sometimes they blow the whole damn thing up.

You can attribute my ability to blow the damn thing up with being the impetus for learning HTML and CSS. I am not fluent in either but I have gained enough knowledge there to become dangerous or to at least have a sense of what questions I should ask.

I don’t mind doing the research to figure out how to fix things but given a chance to avoid the problem I would prefer to do things to prevent the problems from occurring.

I have been rich and I have been poor, been somewhere in between those things too.

The night I realized I was going to have to sell my house I made a decision to make sure that education would be the bedrock of all I would build in the future.

I would focus on becoming a knowledge broker because once I had it there was no one who could take it from me. Didn’t have to worry about whether the company I worked for was well run or managed poorly.

Didn’t matter whether I won the lottery or lost my last time playing cards in Vegas because the key to the vault would be contained inside my head.

What About That Formula for Blogging?

Ask me what a man/woman/child needs to be a successful blogger and I’ll tell you they need to be curious, passionate and interested in sharing that with others.

I’ll tell you if they can figure out how to share their joy and their interest with others in a way that allows the reader a chance to sense and feel what they experience, well they’ll probably be able to say they are onto something.

One of the big tricks is making sure you sustain your effort. Build a good foundation and you’ll have a castle that will stand for years and after you are gone might still be of interest to tourists.

Take the fast and easy route and you risk creating a house of cards that isn’t capable of withstanding a soft breeze.

Don’t quite know we reached this point or how I went from the start to the finish but I kind of enjoyed the journey, maybe you did too.