I started my blog in December of 2004. It was the week between Christmas and New Year's and I was still new on my job. My supervisor was on vacation, our customer was shut down, I didn't have access to some of the systems needed to do my job, and because I was on a contract and Christmas was on a Monday and I didn't get paid for it, I was pulling 10 hour days with no actual work to do. I stumbled upon Blogger and decided to take a chance. Free blog hosting? I had nothing to lose.
Some of the professional bloggers say that one of the simplest things you can do to guarantee blogging success is to stick with it. I think I have done that. I joined AdSense in the hopes of earning a little bit of extra money from my writing, possibly to feed my tech habit. By this point, I'd be happy if it would help me to pay off my massive student loans from University of Phoenix, where I am still attending working toward my Information Technology degree. I started a podcast at one point, but never went anywhere with it.
When I first started blogging, I had some twisted hope of making it as a social/political commentator. I've mentioned before that I've given that idea up. If I do take on socio/political topics, I hope to do it completely absent of a party line and tackle only the facts and worldviews that make up the arguments, rather than the party generated talking points. I wish to approach from reason and leave emotion out of it.
I've tackled time management and computer related topics. Those are the most fun for me to do. I came up with the whole Life Integration angle because as a computer geek, I obviously enjoy working with my computers but as a family man, I also need to give my family the attention they deserve and I figured there must be others out there like me so as I tackle these issues I can share my thoughts with others.
Often, when I'm researching an issue, I can't find any information at all. When I was trying to decide whether to spend $200 on the ThinkTQ system, or looking for information on the University of Phoenix, I really couldn't find anything. I figured that alone should propel me to the top of the search engine rankings as I share my experiences with others on these subjects.
That leads me to making a decision. Blogger is free and offers a few decent services. I never have to worry about bandwidth or space limitations. However, posting isn't always easy. Third party offline blogging clients like W.Bloggar don't always work right with Blogger's interface, and posting images is a serious pain in the neck. If I want to offer advice or technical help and need to post a lot of screen shots like I did in this post, Blogger doesn't make it very easy. Blogger's API won't accept images from an offline blogging client at all. Blogger's templates can only be customized so far.
My goal is to earn a little extra income from writing posts and recording podcasts that are informative and interesting on a variety of subjects. I would like to help you with some basic computing issues, and through my experiences to tackle subjects like marital communication, child raising, and living a Christian life that is alive and vibrant rather than dull and ritualistic. I need to decide now if I should remain with Blogger or look for a paid service such as Typepad.
2 comments:
Hi Eric, I work with the TypePad team and just wanted to drop you a line to let you know we'd love to have you give the service a try. It's easy enough to import your Blogger posts if you'd like, and the ability to do things like run your own ads is built right in. Either way, good luck with your blog!
anidash, thank you. I'm taking the 30 day trial that Typepad offers, and so far I'm really impressed with the service. I'm duplicating most of my posts here on Blogger just in case I don't stick with Typepad, but for now I don't see why I wouldn't.
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