In this post, I will be taking a pause and considering how my blog has gone for the last year: a 2020 blog review if you will. From the reader’s perspective, not much happened – just the single post at the start of the year. However, from my perspective, the coding side went well with 5 ‘blog’ projects completed by year’s end. Unfortunately, the associated posts failed to make the blog. Why?
Good intentions
At the start of the year, I planned to produce about 6 posts, one appearing every other month. I already had a couple of completed projects ready to write up, so this seemed reasonable. I am in no way a prolific writer so there is little chance I would be writing a weekly or daily basis. Nor would I be writing any kind of deep-dive articles that peer into the very heart of things. So I believed my modest expectations could be met.
Post Completion
As the year progressed the blog projects were completed, often as part of larger ones I was already working on (one exception). This meant that while I found the time to make projects for the blog, the posts themselves were neglected – I just couldn’t justify spending the time required to pull it all together into posts. For myself the task of pulling all the materials together, making diagrams, cleaning code & writing the blog can takes 2-3 days. I am certain that a more accomplished writer could do this more quickly, but this is what it takes for myself. So it comes down to the fact that I was planning for posts that were well beyond my time budget, which resulted in little to no completion.
More posts?
Assuming that I would like to produce more posts this year, then I will have to accept the smaller time budget and aim for less. Here are my thoughts on the steps that I can use to help ensure my posts make it out.
Ways to increase my blog posting
- Keep each post between 500-800 words so that they are more manageable. Longer posts take longer to write & polish.
- Write regularly and let the quality look after itself. I find that it is easy to proofread and then go into a cycle of changes that only make the article different, not necessarily better.
- Continue where possible to use topics that are related to the area’s of my knowledge (either work or personal interest). This makes the posts easier to accomplish.
- Consider writing more commentary posts. This reduces the need for coding, especially for busy months (applies more to my blog w
- Remove any artificial constraints that I have imposed upon myself. For example to use JavaScript where possible. It is better to have a post written than not.
The alternative is simply to accept a much-reduced output. There are many blogs that only publish posts once every year or so apparently dormant only to spring back to life with multiple posts in quick succession. Maybe that’s fine, though personally, I did feel a bit disappointed with the single post for 2020. It will be interesting to see the ideas from my 2020 blog review result in more posts.
Appendix A – My unpublished blog projects
Here is my list of the small projects that I completed over the year. At some point, some of them may finally result in a blog entry. It gives an idea of the kinds of projects I doodled.
1/ A pure JavaScript message broker that supports ‘#’ and ‘*’ wild cards for both subscription & publishing (partly inspired by an NPM library called postal). I am thinking of taking it into c/++ so that I can use it more generally.
2/ A productivity tool that used a modified keylogging library (only taking minute by minute statistics) to create daily graphs of one’s productivity & providing a list of the most used program. I ended up using this for myself for a while.
3/ A high-performance time-series graph. Just draws large time-series graphs – fast and simple. To demonstrate that writing your own version of something is not always as difficult as one thinks. This was part of a much larger project.
4/ A quantiser to convert raster graphics to SVG. It was more of an excuse to play with a quadtree but ended up requiring 2 interesting sub-tasks: a quad rasteriser and a simple priority queue.
5/ A day/night shader that supports rendering the sun/sky/stars at any time of day from any location on a planet. This was part of a larger project.
Notice
All photos that appear on this post are my own.