LOGAN MEITZ

Why I Have a Blog

This is the first post of my blog. Or, it will be. I'm actually writing it before the blog infrastructure is finished, with the idea that this will allow me to have some kind of content to put down right away so I can see the results of the system without having to populate it with a series of posts that have titles like 'test1' and bodies like 'wnjfcjhnewafnewn'

As the inaugeral piece of output on this platform, it seems like the best place to start defining what the point of having a blog is to begin with. Ironically, the first thing I think of on this topic is a post titled 'Why I Don't Have A Blog'. I first read this post at the start of the year when I was setting up my website and conceptualizing what a blog of mine might look like. Despite the title, I walk away from the post pretty inspired. There's a strong argument made at the beginning that merely having a blog is worthwhile as a matter of personal of personal development, while the back half of the post reflects on the meaningless of the actual output with all the usual concerns. That doesn't seem particularly concerning if, as Federico already pointed out, the journey is more important than the destination. It's also a fun little slight of hand that the whole post which is ostensibly about how the writer could not maintain an interesting blog is actually a pretty interesting read in and of itself. To sum it up, what I took from this was that writing is helpful to you, it's probably not something that you're going to get a lot of attention for and your writing might be more interesting than you think. As somebody who read this just as I was considering what I wanted out of a blog of my own, it gave me a bit to think about, but I ultimately found the whole thing reassuring.

If I spend any more time on that blog's lack of existence I feel like I'm essentially dancing on it's grave so it's probably about time to move on. Let's talk about my own blog, which is intended to be real and contain more than one post. I think I'll mainly use the posts to rubber duck my way through technical efforts, essentially forcing myself to do all sorts of healthy activities like self reflection. The three main style of posts I'm looking to create are book reviews, tech diary style posts, and some mini essays. My intention with book reviews is not like consumer style reviews with ratings or something, just book club style reviews where I talk about the contents of the book and how I feel about it. I read a lot of tech books and writing 'reviews' would give me a chance to think about the major concepts and potentially deepen my understand of what I've read. Tech diary posts will detail the specs and hurdles for whatever projects I'm currently working on. Maybe I'll even flatter myself with a bit of promotion upon the completion of a project I'm proud of. It'll likely take me a while to get around to the essay style posts. Those ones are fun to think about, because that's the type of thing that in theory is shareable to the general tech community. Hey who knows, maybe in a few years I'll be able to argue about some concepts in the current zeitgeist and get some traffic. That's getting pretty far ahead of myself though. As stated in the previous paragraph, it's the writing itself that makes this a useful exercise, not other people reading it.

This is as good a time as any to talk about the technical side this blog. The idea here will be to host blog posts in a MongoDB database use php to pull the posts. Creating a bespoke content management system in this way is complete overkill for the scope of this project. I'm fine with that overkill though as that is the other big reason I'm interested in creating a blog. By doing this as a personal project I can look for some ways to flesh out my experience with tools I do not use in my day job. It fits in nicely with the ethos of my site overall, where I've tried to build things from scratch as much as possible.

I think that about wraps up this post. It was nice talking with you.