Blogging Milestones

When this blog was first conceived of, a couple of months ago, I really had no idea what to expect and surely hadn't played extensively with the exisiting blogging packages to see what was really involved.

Ironically enough, as a well seasoned Cold Fusion developer and entrepreneur, I have been working on my own blogging software for some time, but delayed the launch of my blog hoping to work within my own software. But everyone who's ever written software knows that things take longer than expected, however, the flow of ideas and things I wanted to comment on did not. So I bit the bullet and went with one of the pre-existing packages.

Needless to say, this has been fun so far and I only hope I can keep up with the pace required to make something meaningful and lasting. It is definitely not hard to come up with ideas for content, just taking the time to write them down and provide the context is challenging with my schedule.

In the past two weeks, I have seen the blog grow slowly and surely. Seeing traffic slowly grow in such a short period of time is really an amazing thing and there are hardly enough experiences I can dream up to compare it to at this time. Naturally, there are many other things to get done, but I thought I would recount a few of the things, silly as they are, that have happened so far.

Template Re-Design

In a past life, I was a graphic designer. I've held on dearly to those values and attention to presentation and detail throughout my career as a developer as well. Naturally, I was not prepared for the trials of imagining an identity for this blog.

Fortunately, my daily trials of the blogosphere took me to The Mossy Blog to read up on some Flash work and I was struck by the design of their blog. Of course, I was also taken aback as I realized I couldn't whip this up in any time flat. As fate would have it, though, I found that they used a great template as their starting point created by the fols at Leorex called the Aura Web Page Exoskin. A couple of hours later, I was on my way with a new design to boot.

Trackbacking

This may sound crazy, but it's a pretty scary thing the first time you actually Trackback to someone else's entry. I can say that butterflies did indeed form that first time I hit Publish. I think it boils down to fact that at that moment you are not just blogging your thoughts, but you are actually letting another node in our world know. The blogging world is far smaller than might be expected and once you put your flag out, people do indeed find it.

Getting Trackbacked

Of course, once you are writing , you are hoping that someone else is seeing what you say and finds it interesting enough to share that with their own circle of friends. I got my first Trackback from Ben Hammersley to an entry that I had made. Granted, this wasn't the sort of mention I was anticipating, but it was exciting nonetheless.

Getting into the Goog

Now I must admit, I'm a programmer geek at heart. I read Full As A Goog on a regular basis. If you don't know, it's a blog dedicated to "Rich Internet Application Goodness". For me, it's one of those sites you hope some day to be a part of. Of course, I knew when I set out that, despite my coding skills and experiences, I didn't want to make another blog exploring coding techniques and issues.. and with that, relinquished that I would not be an ideal candidate to ever show up on the Goog in any capacity.

That all changed today and I'll admit I was actually confused at first! When I dialed in to check out the latest postings, I came across an entry titled Social Twister. At first I thought to myself, "Wow! Someone else is using the name of my blog, and it was John Dowdell, a Macromedia employee and the author of a blog that I visit almost daily. So I read the description and found that John actually was talking about me! I realized that I had pointed back to one of his entries and he must have found out about my site as a result. All I can say is, pretty neat!

In response to John's comment.. I feel the pressure.. but I'm on the job.

That's about all I can report on to date, but it's been a great feeling so far. I actually do hope that as business and consumer adoption of blogging blossoms that the marketing folks don't forget to deal with what it means to you, the owner of the blog.

And by the way, Gothamist.. I do like to use "I" in all my posts. Not sure how else to do it ;)