Blogging is hard

So here’s my first post of 2010, and my first post in about six months. This site has existed in one way or another since June 2002, and it’s never really been updated consistently. If you were to look back at previous incarnations of robmaeder.com, you’ll see a lot of “updates coming soon” style messages, and very little actual content. After contemplating the issue for a while, I think I’ve figured out why.

Firstly, I’m not really that motivated to post things with any sort of regularity. I am not trying to be a “blogger”, necessarily. I just like the idea of having a place on the web to post whatever I want. Usually, when I’m inspired to actually write something, it’s about a subject I know a lot about or am very interested in, or some event that recently occurred. I also tend to post things that I think others will be interested in, or will find interesting or amusing in some way.

The other thing is taking the time to actually sit down and type something out. I have notebooks and papers full of ideas, but I don’t often do anything with them. If I stop and think about it, it really doesn’t take too long to type out a few paragraphs. Although in my case, I usually spend a lot of time doing it, treating it like a high school essay, rather than the informal blog post that it is. I really don’t need to do several drafts of something that few people are going to read. Especially since I’m not getting marks or money for it…

To be honest, two things recently inspired me to even write this up. The first is my friend’s girlfriend telling me robmaeder.com is her new homepage. Whether or not that’s actually true doesn’t matter, but the fact is that I have this site up here on the Internet for everyone to see, and I’m not doing anything with it. If it’s just going to sit here idle, I might as well shut it down.

The other ‘recently inspiring event’ is I just finished helping my brother Chris set up his new website, chrismaeder.ca. He’s convinced the Internet is the key to riches, and I’m starting to think he might be onto something. If he’s going to be 2010′s hottest new blogger, I figure I should try to keep up.

I’m not going to make some outrageous promises that I’m going to post every day, or even on any sort of regular schedule. But if I’m going to keep robmaeder.com alive, I’m going to have to post at least a couple times a month.