rvdavid: A Web Developer's Blog

After thinking up of the Fast 15 category, I’ve done some thinking about the direction that this blog is taking, but first let me tell you about how we got to this Identity Crisis. This blog actually went through a couple of phases:

1. The Web Development Blog Phase
2. The Web Development & Ubuntu Linux Phase
3. The WTF Phase

I’ll give you a brief summary below – within 15 minutes on the first real post on the Fast 15.

The Web Development Blog Phase

For those of you who had just tuned in, this blog started off as a technical blog which specialised in PHP Web Development, PHP Design patterns and anything related to PHP Web Development. This was great at the time because I still had a somewhat basic understanding of OOP and breathed, ate and shat OOP concepts such as Design Patterns, Composition, Aggregation, UML and of course MVC – and I’d post my thoughts on what I think would have been relevant topics.

My readership, I’d imagine would have been comprised completely of Web Developers or those interested in the Web Development field – I think the highest feedburner stat I had was like 32 subscribers.

The thing is that the more I understood about these concepts, the more it was “simple” to me, so I kind of lost track on my progress, it became second nature to think and speak OOP and before I knew it – there was nothing worth “posting” about because I imagined that I’d only be harping on what other people already knew as common OOP knowledge.

So I was posting less and less frequently.

The Web Development & Ubuntu Linux Phase

It was also at this time, when I had been introduced to the Linux Desktop Distro called “Ubuntu” and again, I felt challenged and breathed, ate and shat Linux commands which, by the way, I still do to a certain extent. I posted about what I had to do to get wireless cards working, how to fix certain bugs etc.

This of course is a blogger 101 no-no, because my readership was interested in PHP Web Development – I could picture them saying: “WTF?! I’m using Windows” or “WTF?! I’m using a Mac!” then in unison they say “Where’s the PHP posts at?!” Readership dropped down to about 18 – 19 and peaked at about 24 during this period.

But since Ubuntu now supports my laptop out of the box (kudos by the way guys), I don’t need to tinker with it to get my wireless network card working or configure sound or flash. It just works (well for me anyway) – so as a by-product of that, I really don’t have anything to post aside from “hey I’m installing software from the list of 100 linux software I found on the nets” type posts. So again – no relevant posts.

Late last year I decided to update the look and feel and moved my blog’s domain from blog.rvdavid.net to www.rvdavid.net I put in the necessary redirects, but this does not bid well for my RSS feed subsribers. My feedburner RSS stats went down to about 7 readers – it’s picked up a little again though now we’re back to double digits at 12.

Identity Crisis: WTF Type Blog is this now?

Anyway, point of this post is that now my blog is going through something like an identity crisis: “Is this a Web Develpoment Blog?” “Is this a Ubuntu Desktop Linux Blog?” “Now that I’ve decided to get into body building, will this be a body building blog?” I really don’t know. From where I sit I guess I have the following options:

1. Create separate blogs for each topic I’m interested in main pros being I can provide content and perhaps increase my readership. Main cons being the time factor – I simply just do not have the time. I’m not a full time blogger, I’m running a Web Development Business.
2. Create separate categories and make the links more visible. Pros – the site will be divided nicely and people will know where to go to get content relevant to them. Cons – It may just be a complete waste of time considering readers use RSS or similar syndication methods via their favourite services.
3. Roll on with what I’ve got so far. Continue with the changed focus from the Technical and somewhat barren “Web Development Blog” to the more personal, but not so specific “A Web Developer’s Blog”. Pros – I post more so there’s more content and people actually get the chance to read about what I’m actually thinking outside of the odd “how to integrate doctrine with ZF” or “how to activate the backspace shortcut key to being the back button in firefox” type posts. Cons – I post more, meaning I contribute to the irrelevant, uninteresting noise that’s currently out there on the internet with people saying “we don’t give a fuck about how interesting, quirky, funny your day has been… STFU!” (haha)

My Decision and the Conclusion

I make decisions firmly and stick with them for better or worse – well, for a while anyway and I have decided to run with option 3. Based purely on the fact that the cons could be attributed to my being diagnosed as a paranoid narcissist.

Anyway, I’ve gone way over time with this – my fast 15, has become the slow 30 I’ll be sure to be faster next time. Keep in touch.

Related posts:

1. New Schedule & Blog Category: “Fast 15″

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