Blogger’s Block

One barrier to my blogging has always been technical. For a non-techie, I’m reasonably web-savvy, after five years of working full-time on intranet content. But, perhaps because I don’t have a technical background, I get stuck when software doesn’t behave the way the instructions say it should behave.

That seems to happen a lot, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. My wife the Web Goddess, who taught herself HTML after years as a corporate systems developer, initially tried to set this blog up with WordPress, since that was the consensus choice when I polled my LinkedIn connections about blogging platforms. But I got lost almost immediately in the documentation (“start a blog in seconds” my ass), and even the Web Goddess eventually threw up her hands and said the system was not doing what the documentation clearly said it would do.

So here we are on Blogger, having registered the subdomain blog.kirkpetersen.net, trying to figure out why that URL still returns a 404 error (see, I know web-speak) even though the control panel at the web-hosting service indicates the DNS has propagated.

Add all that to the fact that I’m not sure what I want to write about, and I end up with four posts in the first four years of my blog. Hence, the write-something-every-day experiment, now entering Day Two.

A Blog in Search of a Purpose

Some day, when I’m a titan of the blogosphere, I’ll be able to say, “I’ve been blogging since 2003.”

Before my titanship arrives, however, I obviously need to post a little more regularly, and before I do that I need to figure out why I’m blogging in the first place. My most recent motivation has been to support my writing and consulting business — but then when it came time to actually write my first substantive post, it ended up being about politics, which is not the line of work I’m in.

So maybe my real motivation is to have A Forum for My Writing. [hurl] Despite the gag reflex, there’s something to that idea — I often find myself constructing careful sentences in my head that seem clever or useful enough that I wish I could find a way to share them. But if I’m going to continue to think red-state thoughts in a blue-state neighborhood, I’m more likely to get into arguments with friends than I am to persuade anybody to hire me as a writer. And I spent most of an afternoon writing and polishing my inaugural Obama screed — an unbloggish level of effort for a post that precisely three people have seen (including me).

So here’s the latest plan: I’m going to force myself to devote at least a little bit of time every day to posting on my blog. I’ll pick one of those careful sentences in my head and build a blog post around it, and not invest a huge amount of time in it. Then I’ll examine the results over time and see if I can figure out a purpose for my blog.

There. It’s good to have a plan. Now we’ll see if I’m any better about sticking to that plan than I am about my daily exercise regimen.