A vacation is what you take when you can no longer take what you’ve been taking. –Earl Wilson
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One big problem with maintaining a blog about–well, about anything–is that you set yourself up with certain expectations about your productivity. Usually it starts with a stream of consciousness daydream that ultimately leads to this revelation: “Hey, I should write that down!”
Then you start thinking “Hey, I’ve got more stuff I think about that I should write down.”
And so you do. For a while. You spend days or weeks putting fingers to keyboard, trying to be clever, crowing a little and maybe even eating a little crow. All to the good.
Then life creeps in. Suddenly you find yourself thinking, “Ok, I really don’t have time to come up with another blog idea this week, so I’ll skip this week and put something up next week. Only two or three people read this thing and it’s mostly for me anyway.”
Then next week comes. And the next. And the next. Before you know it, July 2012 is long in the past and you begin to wonder what happened to the dude with all the ideas he wanted to post about. Where did all that energy go? You discover that you’ve taken a year-and-a-half unintended vacation from your blogging, so as far as the Interwebs is concerned, you might as well have died.
Fact is, I can’t really account for where it all went. One minute I was thinking about posting here. The next I’d forgotten all about it and was well into some other project or mundane task. However, I do take some solace in the fact that I have not been goofing off all this time. In fact, I’ve been quite busy. Here are a few things that have happened in the past year:
WordPress Plugins
I updated both my WordPress plugins (ScrapeAZon and GoodReviews) with some new features and fixes. As of this writing, I’m testing the latest versions in WordPress 3.8.
Ebook Publishing
I played a small part in ushering some writer friends (one known and one unknown) into the age of ebooks by performing some of the development end tasks for them.
Writing/Blogging
I wrote a buncha entries for Boson Software’s IT blog. I also worked on a few of my own short stories, a novella, and a little bit on a novel.
General Handiness
I finally finished building that entertainment center I’ve been wanting to finish for three years.
Mostly, I’ve been working my day job and being a family man. And that last is what matters most.
In light of my revelation that I will never, ever post to this blog more than weekly (if that), I’ve decided to make myself this promise: I will continue to blog here when it strikes me. It might not be weekly. It might not even be monthly or semi-annually. But occasionally a man needs a place to dump his head. It might as well be here. And I do plan on it not being an entire year before I blog again.
Onward!