One thousand visits

Pont de Diable, Hérault river.

When I started blogging  it was just to get firsthand experience of blogging and I decided to write about my professional life only. I have avoided meta blogging, i.e. write about the fact I’m blogging. But now I got 1000 visits on my blog and I think that deserves a post of its own. When I started I really didn’t expect anything I just wrote some posts and that were more or less it. But very early on I became obsessed with the statistics Google served me. Who reads what posts, when and from where. To me one thousand visits  from all over the globe is big. I’m not writing about popular topics and I have not done much to make my blog stand out. And I also realized how hard it is to write good coherent posts, especially in an language which I do not fully master. It is two very different things read and write. I read English more or less fluently, but I do not write nearly as good. My vocabulary is IT and a bit academic and I miss the nuances of words. But I do think my posts are written well enough to be understood. And I find it fun to write these posts. Blogging is a very good experience. I also got one comment for which  I’m very happy, proud and thankful. I also got some comments from people who want to promote commercial software. I have decided not to publish such comments, since I cannot take any responsibility for those products. Free software would be something else though.

I also realized you can use a blog as a documentation system for your software, overviews of software makes good posts. I have referred to some of my posts in my daily work. I can well imagine a good blog is a very effective way for consultants to market themselves. When I hire a consultant first thing I do is to search the internet. What do my own blog tell about me? I have not given that any thoughts, my goal was not to market myself, if that had been the case I would have structured the blog differently and be much more careful with what and how I write. This is also a learning experience, you need to practice blogging to be good at it. The topic I ‘ve chosen for my blog ‘software development’ is not the simplest thing to write about. You need to publish good examples, correct measurements etc. and great attention to details. If I wrote post to market myself I would have put much more efforts to the examples, readability and layout. And there are some posts that not should have been published.

Will I proceed to post here? I think so, but probably less frequent and I do not intend this blog to stay for eternality. I may start other  blogs writing, on other topics, I have other interests beside IT, science, history are things I can imagine myself to write about. People have told me I’m funny in a positive way, in Swedish I can write things people laugh at (in a positive way). It would be a great challenge to try to write humorous posts in English. I have an eye for petty everyday things that go wrong. And I can write about renovating kitchen when everything goes wrong.

I write this post from a small southern French town Gignac just west of Montpellier. I’m not much for traveling these days, my sons persuaded me to come along and we went by car, a bit too long it’s about 2300 km from Stockholm. It is very nice here, not so much tourists. We swim in the river Hérault where the local youngsters jump from the 18 meters high medieval bridge Pont de Diable (the devil's bridge), I saw some guys jumping off a modern 25 meter bridge.  This is dangerous some die, I been told you can get caught in a powerful  undertow, but I suspect the jump in itself can be mortal it looks scary, I would never do it. But I got a friend who would and he would add one or two somersaults just for fun. Today we will do some sightseeing, there is an authentic crusaders village up in the mountains we all like to see. We are a bit sunburnt and should stay away from the sun, so sightseeing is perfect today.

I have noticed it is popular among blogging IT guys to write about local beers  when they travel. This is something I cannot do. I do not drink beer anymore I suspect I get migraine from it. I do not drink red wine or colored liquor either.  It’s the same thing migraine. I only drink Gin, Vodka, white wine including Champagne. It is a tough life I live.