Lessons Learned Week

2022-08-29 22:24:01 PDT

Apparently this is Lessons Learned Week in Blaugust. Blaugust is almost over: just a few more days.

Oh, right. Lessons learned.

• I might as well give up on genre blogging. The things I want to write about are all over the map. It's going to be that way. I once got kicked from a blog ring about X Development for being too off-topic about X Development. I guess GitAtom needs tags and topic filters. Atom supports tags, so there's that. I'll add it to the GitAtom enhancements list. Holding your breath for anything on that list would be really dangerous.

• Co-developing blog software is a mixed blessing. Modern freely-available blog platforms are pretty darn sophisticated. Taking a student project to a usable state while trying to do Blaugust was questionable at best. I'm relieved to be a little on top of GitAtom now, but concerned at how much I still want to do. To be fair, without this blog GitAtom would have ended its life stale and forgotten.

• I am not a social blogger. That's an OK thing not to be. I think it would be silly to blog if I didn't want people to read my content at all. However, there's no urgency and no pressure for me there. I haven't engaged at all on the Blaugust Discord. I will try to do that here at the end, but it's probably too late. I can live with this.

• Schedule and size are a thing. I think I'll keep blogging for sure, but probably not on a daily schedule. That turns out to be just a little more than I want to do. My goal after this month is 14+ posts per month. I really am going to start building up a queue, saving out some non-time-sensitive posts even though they're ready to go. At some point soon I'll decide on a regular posting schedule: that's a thing I've never done before.

  I want to quit with the tiny "post-for-the-sake-of-posting" posts. I don't like them. It looks like my most comfortable length so far is around 400-500 words. Not long by blog standards, but substantial. I have a few longer posts covering a topic in more depth. I feel like I can knock out 500 words in 20 minutes or so, usually. That's a fine amount of time to spend a few times a week on this hobby.

I have some other aspirations for this blog as well. That's a good topic for a future post. Another 500 words folks can read or not on a random topic on my GitAtom mess. Riveting, I'm sure.