Tagline: Blogging is a very easy looking activity, , until you actually begin with it…

Most probably even the irregular readers of rubyrailways have noticed a 3 month period of silence during the summer, , which has just ended a few days ago. , In my opinion it is generally not a very good idea to temporarily abandon a blog, , without even announcing a summer holiday or posting a note like “to be continued after an undefined period of blogger’s block” or something. , Why did I allow it happen then?

Well, , there are a handful of reasons for this: summer holidays, , though days at the work, , lot of stuff to do on my PhD but mainly a kind of a blogger’s crisis. , Although all the reasons are very interesting, , I would like to elaborate on the last one a bit.

The first problem stems from the relative success of my previous entries: Tutorials like Install Internet Explorer on Ubuntu Dapper in 3 easy steps, , Data extraction for Web 2.0: Screen scraping in Ruby/Rails or Getting Ruby on Rails up and running on Ubuntu Dapper were quite popular and set a standard which was not easy to top (or at least to maintain) in terms of equally interesting topics. Unfortunately I can pursue Ruby, , Rails and even screen scraping/web extraction only in my spare time which is a scarce resource (it’s kind of hard to work full time, , roll a PhD and blog simultaneously :-)) and therefore I do not bump into an interesting topic just every second day. , However, , this eventually got me into a kind-of an inverse Concorde-effect: If I have waited a week, , then I can wait another to deliver something sexy. , After a month: Now that I have waited a month, , I surely have to come up with something really juicy… , You get the idea.

I believe I am not the only one around with this thinking pattern, , and I am not sure how are others handling this problem, , but I have decided to give up this habit - in the future I would like to blog regularly, , even at the cost that not every post will be a top-notch blockbuster :-).

The second problem is that I am kind of a renaissance guy: I am interested in new technologies, , programming, , science research, , economics, , reading books just about everything, , photography, , traveling, , computer games, , sports… However, , since rubyrailways is my first attempt at blogging, , I am quite unsure how to deal with this amount of information: what should be the ratio of not-necessarily-correlated topics (e.g. , Ruby, , travelling and PhD research). , I am nearly sure though that it is not a good idea to blog about everything, , since then every post will be uninteresting for most of the readers. ,

Yes, , I know that categories were invented to workaround this problem. , However, , in my experience most of the people today are using feed aggregators and/or personal start pages like bloglines, , netvibes or pageflakes, , and hence are facing this problem nevertheless. , Yes, , they could ignore the posts that are not interesting to them, , but after doing so a few times they will potentially ignore your whole blog. So how to find the golden mean?

A possible solution is to have a separate blog for everything: In my case this would mean at least a software development (mainly Ruby/Rails), , general technology, , Linux/Ubuntu, , Science/PhD research and a travelling blog. , Well, , I certainly would not have the time to keep up all of them since I am struggling even with rubyrailways :-)… , I could of course ignore what people think about my blog and just write it to myself, , but that would deprive me from knowing what other people think about the things I am after, , which is a very valuable information for me.

I would be very much interested in your opinion on this topic: How do you solve this ‘feature creep’ on your blog - by maintaining more blogs, , focusing on just one topic and ignoring the others, , or trying to balance somehow?

Please leave me a comment or send me a mail, , I’d really like to hear your opinion…

Similar Posts:online viagra

If you liked the article, subscribe to the feed   and follow me on .

      

This entry was posted on Friday, September 29th, 2006 at 1:31 am and is filed under Blogging, News, Web2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.