There are a lot of blogs out there and many people are saying that they’re the top new way for a business to communicate with its customers (and potential customers), or at least a way to maintain a nice flow of content to keep yourself in the search engines’ eyes, so here’s another one going into the mix.

I’ve seen some very good, very successful company blogs out there which have led me to the decision to start this one. The blogs I have in mind are those which visibly contribute to the success of the (small) business which runs them. These businesses have the common factor that the blog itself can serve to showcase the owner’s skills in that business - writers, business coaches, self-help gurus…

But I don’t do any of that. I write software. Writing software on the blog or blogging about how to write software would be a great way to contribute to the software development community, but it would have no relevance to anyone who might require my services. Conversely, a blog that was all about marketing would produce very little actual value, not to mention that it would be largely inauthentic of me to do so.

To resolve this, I’ve settled on creating a two-pronged blog. (All the pro bloggers who write about focusing on a single topic and never straying from one well-defined niche may now collectively gasp in dismay.) All posts will be categorized as either “Technical” or “Non-Technical”.

• “Technical” posts will be those which directly relate to the actual process of crafting software. The first few in this category will be design- and usability-focused, but coding techniques and the like will appear there, too.
• “Non-Technical” posts will cover anything else.

Feel free to subscribe to only one category’s RSS feed if the other doesn’t interest you. It won’t bother me in the least. Honest.

That still doesn’t address the issue of showcasing my skills on the blog, though.

I’ve decided that the way to accomplish that is to make the blog itself a demonstration of my skills by writing my own blog software, to be known (somewhat unimaginatively) as NomadNet::Blog. It’s not going quickly, as I don’t have that much free working time to do it in, so I’ve decided to start out with using WordPress rather than waiting until NN::Blog is ready to face the world. Going this route will also pretty much force me to write an import tool which will convert a WordPress blog’s data into something usable by NN::Blog; I expect that having this capability will greatly increase the odds of anyone other than me using it.

So that’s where we’re starting from. Stick around and I hope you enjoy your stay.
 
 
 
P.S. Getting this blog to match the look of the rest of my site involved a bit of ad hoc tweaking to WordPress beyond simply editing the base Sandbox theme. If you happen to notice any dark corners of the blog which don’t look quite right, please contact me and let me know so that I can get them cleaned up.