I kind of used to think myself silly for indulging in blogs. Vain mis­sives stream­ing into the wild, like a tree falling in the for­est with no one to hear it, I would often think, but I per­sisted — if incon­sis­tently. These days though, it is a very rare day that goes by at work where I am NOT post­ing some­thing to one of the sev­eral blogs I help main­tain. So it doesn’t seem like such wasted effort. Not that it makes it any less vain, but knowl­edge seeks a mouth to speak and a skill seeks hands to keep busy, and it is nice to have that some­thing I never both­ered to imag­ine would have com­mer­cial outlet.

I did setup the blogs for the Tryon Daily Bul­letin, that was not near as suc­cess­ful an imple­men­ta­tion, and it has to do with the savvi­ness of the users. RSS feeds, blogs, and the way that peo­ple use the web just never really sank in. Remem­ber, you can’t bull­shit the user. You have to work with the user, not tell them how it is going to be and let them sink or swim. They won’t stop using the web because you can’t design it well; they’ll just mosey over to some­body else’s patch of web real estate and set their eye­balls there. With­out using and read­ing blogs you can’t be an effec­tive blog­ger. I was never very proud of that imple­men­ta­tion, so I won’t claim it.

But now I feel like I have it way more fig­ured out, and I am rewarded for push­ing my lim­its. I’m no longer told to hold it back to con­voy speed — slow­est sets the pace.

That’s a good feel­ing, and it comes with a paycheck.