Kool Aid Served Daily

I don't know why I blog. I mean, I know I like to write Science Fiction stories and I think I have a lot of interesting things to share. But, I'm normally very reserved and quiet shy. I'm insecure about my writing - I had no problem in publishing technical papers or making technical presentations. But then again, they aren't a window into myself.

I've never had a diary or a journal - I don't even like keeping one at work.

Why then do I blog? I don't know. I try to tell myself no one is reading it - but people at work send me email about my entries. I also get very competitive with the Daily Hits rate. The internal mailing list talks about how inaccurate the counter is - it goes on page loads. They all mention statcounter.com, which counts hits based on javascript code running. It paints a different picture of how busy my site is each day.

I like looking at the pretty map on clustrmaps.com. Ignore for a moment the information you deliever whenever you querey any web page. This app is really quite powerful in letting you see which locations are accessing your product.

And finally, I tag all of my article in the hope that technorati.com will start giving me a higher ranking.

Why do I care who visits my site? The numbers really don't mean much. I could write a robot to drive my page count high. I could add keywords or pictures to make Google searches hit my page. As a matter of fact, we don't have a metric to tell us how the big hitters in our ballpark compare to other blog sites.

One thing I did find, the more content you put on your blog, the more hits you get. That actually makes me feel better. When you first get a Sun blog account, you get instructions telling you to write about what you know. I decided to do technical accounts of getting gear to work or debugging NFS problems. I also decided to write about company culture. I think I've done okay on both fronts.

But I also like to write Science Fiction. I've decided to not just share my stories, but to also start sharing the mechanics behind writing the stories. I don't know if I do it like other writers.

I also want to start recording when I change my blog appearance. I flipped through several styles early on. I eventually picked one and started heavily modifying it. I wish I had recorded what drove me to add each little bit. I've tried to add some of that flavor here for the counter information.