Why am I blogging?

Now that I have more time again to focus on blogging and my own coding I was thinking quite a lot about why am I really blogging? I had a long period when I was trying to rally the Perl community to invest more energy in promoting what we do. I managed fairly well getting some people to come to FOSDEM, T-Dose and a number of other events.

In other areas I was less successful.

I even got some very negative feedback on some of the things I have been doing. In some cases, after a while the same people who criticized me followed my route. I am sure some of the stuff I do upsets people. Without they giving me real explanation I'll take that as a compliment. No change without conflict.

In other posts I was trying to help fellow bloggers. For example I suggested we should mention each others blogs more often. That will increase the importance of those blogs both in the eyes of the reader and in the eyes (what?) of the search engines.

While the primary purpose of the Perl Weekly is to help people to focus on the most important news, I hope once the website gets enough inbound links, it will also serve as a reinforcement to the sites mentioned in it.

I was doing this because I like Perl and I would like to see more people know and like it.

I was hoping that in the long run it will also help my business but I have not seen any direct impact so far.

The other reason for some of my blogs was to help people using Perl. People who have no previous experience to start Perl in the form of the Perl Tutorial series. People who are interested in Perl 6 via the Perl 6 trick and treats and via the Perl 6 tutorial series. I had a series of posts and a newsletter about testing as well.

Lately I have been reading the CopyBlogger quite a lot and the post about Purposeful blogging is especially interesting. While I think I have some overall purpose of my blogging I think most of the posts I wrote without thinking what exactly I am trying to achieve with that post?

Notes

The previous lines were based on a draft that, according to the timestamp of the file, I have written sometime around Tue Sep 13 00:49:56 2011.. I guess I wanted to write a lot more and then did ran out of steam.

It was 2 months after I've started the Perl Weekly newsletter and almost a year before I've started the Perl Maven site and the Perl 6 Maven site.

Since then I've written almost a 1,000 articles and recorded about 200 screencasts. Although I make some money with these articles, it is far from being a "business".

The two most recent contracts I had were from people I knew from a long time when I was organizing the local Perl Mongers so I am still not sure if there is any direct impact of all this work on my income, but I enjoy publishing stuff and I still have some hope of turning this into a sustainable business.

Since I wrote the draft I've also diversified my writing to other areas, not just Perl. Most of those articles are published on the Code Maven which is growing steadily, but it is still far from the reach of the Perl Maven site.

I enjoy writing because I use that as tool for learning. When I write an article that usually makes me research the topic deeper. To ask questions I anticipate from the readers and try to answer them.

These articles also help me prepare my training courses and hopefully they are useful to other people as well.

This actually is a major fun part of writing articles. When I see people sharing my articles, or when sometime they even write to me thanking for the solutions they've found on my sites.