Intro

I've been blogging in some type or the other since the early 2000's. At that point it was just an exercise required for college. It started from there and various other attempts and iterations lead me to other types - two of which were actually spurred on as something which is very relevant to the programming field. This included.

With all that what does successful bloging mean? Let's take a quick peek.

Just the good parts

Paring away almost everything else, I've had probably two main blogs my whole life which had an intrinsic goal which required acheiving certain outcomes. And by needing to achieve such outcomes, it implied a certain aspirations towards success.

First true blog

This would be the pinnacle of my all my various efforts at the beginning to start a blog. All the others were just muted efforts which were either for a specific puporse or just for personal use - and they were all quite shortlived. This one came about at the end of all those efforsts, and its aim ,which I can quote from the very first article - a preamble slash vision statement if you will:

...goal is just keep a sleek, succinct version of day to day events with a minimum of text. And images to map events, memories, etc. as well as providing visual(s) [appeal].

If you would like to see it here's a link to the post dated July 12th 2007 - click here .

It evolved beyond that to becoming something where I would write not only my updates but musings, thoughts and then later became some place to review popular media, a bit of products and eventually coding related matter. But it's since devolved into something of a secondary repo.

So content wise it's become somewhat stale and stifled, but updated consistently nevertheless. And in 13 years, I've only missed just one year - 2015.

Second true blog

Now the second blog I started was purely devoted to coding and entirely to JavaScript. I had maintained it with articles of varying clarity and quality for near 3 years. It was to chronicle my journey towards learning coding in general and JavaScript in particular. Numerous life tumults meant that it was sitting idle and I could barely learn or work with code, let alone blog about it. And it was running on custom domains and hosting. So in the end couldn't justify it and had to decommission it.

Where does this all lead to?

So apart from the artistic, creative endeavour, what would I consider successful blogging to entail? Well these are what has always been true, along with some new ones I picked up after my experiences.

A beautifully crafted space where you can add similarly beautiful crafted pieces -

Yes, esthetics does form part of it, but also form has to lend to functionality, subtly and complimentarily. And if you designed the space you are crafting in, the more precious a thing it becomes.

Coherent, well formed pieces of information -

If you haven't noticed by now, my pieces all have a notion of storytelling, albeit it by a machine that malfunctions, hiccups and adds in almost every single piece of information under the sun while trying to communicate and sound human.

But that's all practice, another decade or so I promise I'll get better by being more precise and cogent ;)

So it's all about having clear, succinct, well thought out and phrased content which will hopefully inform and inspire the reader.

Creating an audience and hopefully earning a living -

Lastly, and not leastly, being able to build a community and credibility. And being able to derive some level of income to be able to maintain not only the blogging itself - this is especially true if you have running costs - but to drive other forms of expressions and creations as they arise through the experience of blogging and learning.