Daily Technical Blog Entry... is it possible?

Ok, I am trying very hard to crank out at least one blog entry every day this work week.

Yes, I have a little pipeline of blog entry topics stashed away on this Community Server right now, and as the questions come to me, I add them to the list, and then ever so often, I go and flesh out an answer to an entry.

I have to say that it is pretty tough to do with purely technical content - there is only so much time I can dedicate to writing the blog entry and then doing some research on the facts to make sure they are correct. I definitely do not want to have any incorrect answers, especially when I can get answers straight from the source - the devolpers that actually implemented the functionality or issue in question.

The challenge, of course, is that developers often explain the feature/functionality in a technically concise way that is unrelated to how the end-user thinks about the problem. I have the fun task of reconciling the two such that it makes sense. But hey, I enjoy it. Those discussions usually make me understand various parts of IIS, like the IIS request processing pipeline, a little bit better... which reminds me. Don't I have some blog entries dedicated to that topic that I plan to write soon? Yeah, I should.

Lately, I have started to turn some of my responses to questions from the various IIS, ISAPI, and Virtual Server newsgroups on msnews.microsoft.com NNTP server into blog entries. Mostly, they are the really long ones that I would normally spend an hour or so thinking, writing, revising, rewording, etc prior to posting, and have the NNTP server delete it all in three months. Well, not anymore! Those lost thoughts that have been stuck in my "Sent" folder are now going to start showing up in this blog... stay tuned.

Now that I have posted for a few months and gathered up a handful of posts, I can start looking at the blog statistics offered by Community Server and make some observations.

• I am somewhat disappointed at the relatively few comments that I receive on each blog entry. I really do not know what makes good comment material. Maybe I have been too thorough in answering the question such that there are no follow-up questions, or maybe the topics are just not worth responding to, or maybe I introduce the blog entries at odd morning hours, or ??? Helpful hints, anyone?
• I am surprised by the number of referral links to many of my posts. Search Engines and blog aggregators definitely seem to scour the ranks of blogs, and some of the entries have the right keywords to surface.

Of course, I really have not studied how blogging "works" as a popularity contest. Right now, I just use it as a way to publish topics that are on my mind or have been asked of me that I feel would benefit many other people. Heck, I have not consciously made any trackback links, worked on a blog roll, etc. Hmm. Maybe there is a better way to use this technology...

//David

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 08, 2005
  There is no try, there is only do.
  
  ;)
• Anonymous
  July 08, 2005
  I'm hardly an authority on the subject, but I've always thought the best policy was to post what you can, when you can. I'm not sure there is or should be pressure to make a post a day, particularly for bloggers that don't get paid for it.
  
• Anonymous
  July 08, 2005
  BTW, If you're thinking about Raymond Chen, he makes a post a day, some of them are a lot deeper and more extensive than others. Eric Lippert, Joel Spolsky, and Paul Graham might be more realistic examples: well thought out essays every 2-4 weeks.
• Anonymous
  July 11, 2005
  Thanks for the correlations.
  
  I am going for best-effort on a daily basis right now. However, I have about two dozen distinct technical topics for future posts, so I have some time to figure it out. :-)
  
  I am really trying to reallocate my time currently spent on the newsgroups to blogging instead -- basically blog the answers to newsgroup questions and post a link in the newsgroup. I really hate how newsgroup servers purge posts periodically; I have lost many detailed posts that way and am trying to reconstruct them from my "Sent" folder into blog entries.
  
  Anyhow, I am still trying to figure out this whole blogging phenomenon. I still see it as something that I contribute information to; have not figured out what I get in return yet. It is really strange communicating without getting any feedback.
  
  //David
• Anonymous
  July 21, 2005
  Almost two weeks ago, I contemplated about the possibility of making a "technical" post daily... because...