This month I want to give myself a little challenge. I want to challenge myself to posting one new post on my blog for each day that occurs in November. This will result in thirty brand new posts from yours truely. My goal is to pump some good content into the Python and Django communities.
I will likely find myself in situations where I will want to blog about something I have no prior knowledge about. I hope this will force me to go learn something new and broaden my scope.
The posts I am going to write will likely vary in subject. I want to write about Python, Django and Pinax. However, I might like to write a piece about software development and best practices I have learned over the years. I will almost certainly be throwing in some special pieces. Stay tuned for those. I may even go as far to venturing outside of the Python world, but they may end up being how I compare X with Python or Django. This is largely dependent on what X is in that case.
A History Lesson
I am not going to cut this piece short just to say I am blogging this month. Let me give you a quick history lesson of my adventures in blogging.
I have been blogging on and off for the past six years. Most my personal sites have been custom built. I never have been satisified with the pre-existing solutions. In the early days I would hack together some PHP scripts and put them on a server for Apache to serve them up CGI style. If I was lucky I had a host that supported mod_php. At the time I never really understood the concept of a framework. I knew there were tools available that would help provide components of a website, but at the time this was a pretty new idea on the web. I would spend time thinking about how to reduce the amount of code I would write. This normally included writing good functions that encapsulated some logic/functionality that I constantly reused. This even went as far as just giving up at maintaining my own blog and using Wordpress or switching to Blogger. It always seemed that I wanted to complete control over my blog.
I discovered Django during a time where I was exploring the possibility of hosting my own blog again. I was pretty new to Python, but had a basic understanding of it. I played with making my own blog and my love of Django began to spill into other projects. Eventually I only used Django for anything web related.
My blog started out at brosner.com. One year during a bit of down time in my blogging I lost the domain. Auto renew was not turned on, for some unknown reason, and the domain was gone. I attempted to get it back, but it fell through. This gave me a new opportunity to start fresh and I went with the next best thing, oebfare.com (rot13 translation of brosner).
Crowd effect
I am not the only person participating in this personal challenge. James Tauber, Eric Holscher, Eric Florenzano, Greg Newman, and Justin Lilly are all going to attempt this feat. Others have done it in the past such as James Bennett and Marty Alchin which is sort of why this whole thing kicked off this year.
My take on blogging
One thing that I have battled with personally is what is a blog. I believe this is largely a subjective term. I have gone back and forth with what a blog post is several times. I tend to prefer a blog post as more of an article than random opinions and links of the blogger. It all started to make more sense when services like Twitter and Pownce came along and helped solidify those micro levels of blogging. Each has there own part in the micro-blogging world. This left me with a blog as something where you put a lot of thought into the content that is put on it.
I am going to leave this blog post with a question for my audience. How do you view blogging?