You Can Blog Too!
This evening I attended a local design meetup called TransformAthens. The topic was Blogging and Your Future and the presenter was John Saddington. John is a well known proponent for blogging and was there to encourage us to either start a blog or keep one going.
I recently started blogging and have found it to be much easier than I figured it would be. First I worried, What would I write about? I didn't realize this at first, but the more I learn, the more I realize that a lot of blogging is simply about sharing your experiences. As a rails and web developer, I have learning experiences every day. So I decided that whenever I learn something new, I'll blog about it. So anytime now that I have to look something up or research an issue, I'll open up Evernote and make a few notes, save the urls or code snippets I used, and save it for later on. Then, at a set aside time, I'll write a blog post about it. Sometimes, if it's going to be a quick post, I'll just stop working on the client work and crank out the blog. I've been doing that for about the past month.
Ok, you're writing, but will anyone read it?
Will it help anyone?
The other day, I recorded a screencast of me setting up a refinery cms rails app and deploying to heroku and published it to my blog. A few days later, I had the idea to send the post to Peter Cooper who publishes a popular Ruby newsletter called Ruby Weekly. I didn't think there was any way he'd publish it, but today Ruby Weekly was released and I about jumped through the roof when I saw he published a link to my post.
So there you have it...what John says is true, you really have no excuse. If you can hit the publish button, you can start and maintain a blog and it'll reward you.
I hope my small experience of a quick success story of starting a blog, actually publishing some posts and getting it picked up by a popular industry newsletter helps. I'm a believer!
Update:
Matt Smith posted a much better recap of the meetup and listed some of the major points John made in his talk. Go check it out !