Today I finally got away from the Wordpress site. Wordpress works fine for most people, but I didn’t like having to go in to a web based GUI to do everything. This site is hosted by Github pages and powered by Octopress, which allows me to use all my favorite tools when I blog: Vim, Markdown, Git, and Bash. Hopefully by forcing myself to use all of these tools all of the time I will eventually get better with them.

Now that I’m on a new blog I was thinking about what I wanted it to be, and I came up with a few ideas. I’m new to this, and it will all probably change, but this is where I’m at now:

Stay on Topic

This blog is purely professional. I write about math, statistics, machine learning, Python, R, and computers. If I decide to blog about a different interest then I can make a new blog for that.

Share Manageable Tidbits

Small posts are valuable too, and they don’t have to be perfect. The goal of this blog is to record the little lessons I learn while programming, or the results of simple experiments.

Shoot for at least 5 hyperlinks per blog post. This is what makes the web a web. I owe this point to Howard Rheingold and his book Net Smart where he writes about the mindful use of digital media. Another inspiration is Wikipedia. The cross referencing that goes on in that site is ridiculous. Some sentences contained more linked than unlinked words.

Give Credit

Use the blog to show appreciation, especially to people working uncompensated on open source projects. This can be done through linking back to their sites.

Make Blogging a Habit

Get in the habit of posting. Could be once a week, or once a month. Need to be comfortable doing this to develop a voice.

Parting Thoughts

Jeff Knupp wrote a great post called ‘How to become internet famous’. In summary: it takes time, and not everything you produce will be good. If you’re a blogger you should check it out, even if you (like me) have no plans or ambitions of becoming famous.