New Year, New Habits

I’m not a great writer. I have a strong grasp of the English language; the breadth of my vocabulary is certainly nothing to scoff at, and I’m obviously capable of constructing relatively well-formed sentences. Yet, I’m still not a great writer.

Writing takes a lot of patience for me. I often revise my sentences at least four or five times. I’ve been known to spend half an hour on a Facebook status update. Even though I may know what I want to say, I don’t necessarily know how best to express it in words. It has to read well, not waste others’ time, and be creative, funny, and clever. But, oh, wait – I could see Jane Smith taking that the wrong way; I’d better revise it in case she happens to see it.

And then there’s thinking of things to say. I love telling people about my passion (programming), but few of my Facebook friends would care to read notes about PHP, HTML, Javascript, et cetera, so I don’t write things like that. In effect, I’ve homogenized my Facebook presence, lest I bother any subset of the speciality-agnostic, poly-disciplinary, heterogeneous set of people I’ve enjoyed spending time with in real life.

But it feels like a terrible waste of potential PageRank for me to spend all day, every day, working on my clients’ projects. Don’t get me wrong – I love my job; I could spend all day, every day, planning, writing, analyzing, debugging, and testing code. It really is my passion.

It seems like everybody who does what I do for a living has a blog, and there are several reasons for that. First and foremost, writing is a great way to organize thoughts. Blogging is also a great form of SEO; blogs are often full of links, they can provide a great benefit to others, and they’re a completely non-spammy way to unintentionally fill a website with keywords.

Basically, I need to start blogging. I’m still worried about coming up with topics to write about, but my hope is that will become easier as I get into it more. (If you have ideas, though, I’d love to hear from you.) If I set a regular schedule and force myself to adhere to it, I hope I’ll be able to come up with things to say. And as much as I don’t understand why people care that the Earth is in the same position relative to the sun as it was 365 days ago (hmm… perhaps my next post should be on recursion?), I suppose I might as well make a New Year’s Resolution to post something five days a week, Monday through Friday, for the rest of the year.

So subscribe to the RSS feed and get ready for a fun year of me trying to write.