Metablog

I enjoy writing on this blog. I started it to have an outlet for my many, diverse, half-baked and even sometimes fully-baked ideas. Now, a lot of what I enjoy about it is the idea of people reading and enjoying what I write. So when I write, I aim for a pretty wide audience. When I explain technical things, I try to provide a background. I try to include neat metaphors, and a bit of humor, and a lively and fresh cadence. I try to make my writing fully engage the attention of the reader, and to teach them new things and share with them the excitement that I obtain from my ideas. If I fail in that goal, it’s not for a lack of trying.

I think this blog is, more than anything, a place for me to try to make beautiful things. Good writing, on whatever subject. Good software, to the extent that I get any software finished and polished enough to publish. Good ideas and arguments. Beauty is in quality.

I don’t have many commenters. This blog is young, and doesn’t update very regularly and often, and has posts on subjects all over the place. (I try to make them accessible, but unless you know a lot, or have thought a lot, about the subject of a post, even if you really like it you’re not going to have much to say.) I don’t actively try to direct traffic to my site by, say, trying to write posts with trackbacks to more prominent blogs, or by directing people to posts on my blog. (Sometimes it happens, but I don’t put that much effort into it.) I don’t really mind the lack of commenters. The kind of commenters I’m after take a year or three to attract. If, by that time, I still don’t have any regulars, I might be a bit disappointed. But, judging by my stats, I have at least a couple dozen people subscribed via rss. (About 250 unique visits a day, where a “visit” is a series of page requests from a single IP with no more than 30 minutes between any two requests. I’m not sure if that concept really works when measuring hits to my rss feed.)

Unlike many bloggers, I don’t read many other blogs. Actually, I think I am like many other bloggers, just not the kind of bloggers who know about each other. I think the kind of blog I run, with a lot of unrelated but technical ideas, tends to be the kind that’s not well-connected in the blogosphere. I only read two or three blogs that have a style that resembles mine. I come across many more than that, but they rarely sustain my interest enough to keep me reading regularly.

Actually, my blog reading habits have been changing recently. I’ve stopped reading political blogs so much. I’ve stopped commenting at as many blogs. My overall blog-reading has dropped a lot. I think I’m changing in some relevant way. Maybe when I get my life organized a bit better and get back into checking my rss reader, I’ll decide to drop some of the political blogs, and maybe start reading more of the kinds of blogs like mine.

Also, I should really figure out a way to export my blogroll to my sidebar. I feel it’s only fair to reciprocate the value I receive from those blogs in whatever small measure I can. And my current sidebar is a terrible representation of what I actually read.

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