“Why do you do it?” asked me a friend sometime ago while talking about my blog.
It impressed me because he said that with a tone and with blown eyes meaning something more similar to “Why the hell are you wasting your time by writing a blog?“.
It surprised me also because this friend is getting a degree in robotics so he’s pretty at ease with modern informatics tools.
He asked me that question maybe because he didn’t understand why someone should feel the need to tell something about himself to whoever happens to read the blog or maybe it didn’t appear justified to him since no one does pay me for the time I spend working on the blog.
I asked the same question to myself and I think the answer is two sided: on one side it’s something useful for me to fix memories in time and to make a point on the progress on my projects, on the other side there’s a natural need to communicate, to offer a service o simply to entertain anyone stopping here to read these lines.
Gratification then comes when someone tells me he read the blog and appreciated its content. In that moment a satisfied smile from a friend o from someone I just did get to know goes way beyond any mere pecuniary remuneration.
Recently I studied the best software platform to the blog to and I chose WordPress after reading the book Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress. I installed WordPress onto my web space and I began populating the database with content starting from the first post I wrote on July 16, 2003 when I launched Ecpc.
After more than 220 posts added here’s the preview of the result: blog.albegor.com
It will take some more time to complete the migration and to customize the graphics, but I already got positive comments on the result and it seems the graphics theme I chose is appreciated.
It has been really strange reading all the old posts while I was copying them. I noticed a different way to write and to propose myself towards readers along the time. I was like a sort of verification of a personal growth. Something I believe to be more that a good motivation to have a blog.