I’ve toyed with the idea of giving up blogging before but I could never bring myself to quit. With the dawn of mirco blogging it would be easier to focus on Twitter and Tumblr and not have to worry about putting content together for a fully hosted website. Sadly I’m seeing this trend take off. Websites and blogs that I used to visit on a regular basis are being abandoned for the ease of merely updating 144 characters — I can’t help but feel something is lost in this. (No doubt how I’m sure many pen and paper authors felt at the dawn of the internet writing.)
For various reasons, I can’t bring myself to give it up. I’ve been maintaining an online presence, or “Ambient Existence” as I’ve come to term it, for over 10 years now and I don’t see myself wanting to give this up anytime soon. My reasons are numerous but here are my top five:
5. It’s A Hobby That Fits My Current Schedule
This hasn’t aways been true — before I was married and a father I would often spend days working with web development — and won’t always be true — my son’s can’t stay in diapers forever — , but currently it’s the perfect activity to keep me busy at the end of the day. Between work, home life, family life and a couple other hobbies I’m refusing to give up, it’s nice to be able to sit down for an hour or two a night and tinker away with something.
If I weren’t doing this, I’d just be watching reruns on TV. Boring.
4. It Let’s Me Be Obsessed About Something
I’ve never really had interests… I’ve always had obsessions. It’s just the way my brain is wired, I’m an all or nothing type of guy. Once I find something that I feel is worth my investment, I end up pouring my all my attention into it.
From big picture content layout to nitty gritty margin and padding details there is no shortage of aspects to conceder in web development. Add to this the fact that the technology is constantly in a state of flux, I always get to be updating; always get to be upgrading; and always get to be improving “the user experience”. Some people might find this tedious, I find it fascinating and challenging.
3. It’s My Perfect Outlet
We all need a place to rant and rave and I like to think of my website as my own little soap box. Looking for content to publish I stumbled upon a great outlet for my incomplete, incoherent, and often utterly random thoughts. Though ranting about these things could come off as self-involved and/or narcissistic, it’s connected me with some people who’ve really helped me. People who I wouldn’t have met otherwise.
Recently, I’ve been trying to keep the stream of self loathing down to minimum. I’ve come to learn that spilling your guts to every one is just about as attractive as it sounds.
2. It Fits Perfectly With My Day Job
My personal website and my work life have a symbiotic relationship. Because they both share the same skill set things I learn at work naturally carry over into personal website and vice-versa. Lessons and technique I’ve learned on my own simply trying to perpetuate my own hobby have improved the skills needed for my job. It’s an amazing cycle of education and implementation — a perfect niche that I’ve come into. I consider myself truly blessed to be one of the few people out there who gets paid to do something he loves to do.
1. It’s Perfect for Archiving
Snowballed into the previously listed benefits, my website serves as a personal and professional archive. This is an area of functionality that I didn’t set out to create. Since I’ve been using the WordPress blogging platform I’ve been categorizing and tagging everything I’ve been posting. The natural result of this has been the creation of a massive repository of information regarding my personal and professional my personal life. Specifically in the areas of my own journaling and photos of family events.
.5 Bonus Reason: I’m Getting Paid To Do It!
I didn’t list this as a primary reason because it’s more of a residual effect than anything else. Blogging makes me money. After years of posting and years of search engines indexing my content, I do alright with ad sales. I’m not going to get rich off of it by any means, but it’s nice to have a hobby that pays for itself.
So those are my reasons for blogging — that’s enough to keep me knee deep and involved in this little hobby of mine for who knows how long. Come to think of it… 10 years is the longest I’ve committed to anything.
