A blog? Why?

There. It’s finally happening – I’m starting a blog.

Several times in the past years, I’ve pondered whether I should start a blog, and if so, why. Some years ago, I started a journal, but after writing in it for a couple of months, I realised that the things I wanted to write were more personal than I wanted to share with the audience – the entire world. So I stopped that experiment.

In the past year and a half, much has changed in my life – mainly in my head. Yesterday, I realised two things:

1. Many times when I was looking for some answer, for example how do to X in django, or how to fix problem Y in Ubuntu, I would end up on a blog. Someone else had encountered the same situation, and had written about it – usually including a way to solve the problem.
2. I have experienced things in my life that are interesting to read about. Maybe someone else will, one day, google for a certain problem or situation, end up on my blog, and find something useful there.

The question “but why would you write something, of which you have no idea if anyone will ever read it?” remains, and I’m not sure about that. Hopefully, some people will read it, post feedback, and trigger an urge to continue writing here.

>So, that’s how this blog got started. I asked some friends on my home IRC channel #carnique which blog software they would use in my situation, and they mentioned WordPress. Apparently version 3.x is significantly better than 2.9.x, so instead of apt-get installing wordpress, I ended up downloading the tarball and following the 5 minute install page. It was indeed very easy and fast to install WordPress.

Now to configure it to my liking, and tame apache’s redirects so I can use decent URIs for permalinks instead of the default blah.php?id=1273 format.

And then the writing can start!