Short answer: I’m lazy.
Long answer: I’m laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazy.
(Whoa, just noticed that WordPress doesn’t seem to wrap long text?) Lame Zero Punctuation puns not withstanding, it’s not just because I’m lazy, it’s that most of the time, the time spent writing could be doing something equally as rewarding, time-wise.
I just counted up last week’s articles that weren’t automatically generated, (i.e. I had to actually do something to blog them, even if it was just hitting a couple buttons), and I counted eight. Just eight. Not ten, not even nine, but eight. At an average of just over one a day, that’s abysmal (more on this later).
Okay, so that’s maybe not the full truth. Maybe it’s because the content I usually want to write about deserves so much more than the paltry couple paragraphs I can produce in any short amount of time. As you may have seen from the Severus quasi-build log, it’s hard to actually put everything I want down if I just say to myself “yep, gotta get this done within the next hour or so”. Not saying that it can’t be done, but it’s certainly a little harder than it needs to be.
Maybe it’s something to do with my writing style (I can usually just bash out any paragraph without going on too much of a tangent), and maybe some forward planning would do me good, but I’m not sure. To truly cover some of the topics I want and do them the justice they deserve, I’d start to be creating articles as long as Anandtech’s Gargantuan SSD Articles of Death – and you, dear reader, without any knowledge of iPhone app Instapaper or the attention span longer than a minute (I’ve seen the Analytics logs; you can’t fool me!), would utterly hate me for it.
It’s not that theres any huge lack of content, either. I might have told you about this before, but I have a note on an app on my iPhone which I write notes in about good things I might want to blog about – once upon a time I would have told you that I kept it as a secret backup store for my weekly blog postings (back in the day when Freshbytes wasn’t, you know, defunct), but now, it’s merely a place to draw inspiration from, a place to put long-term thoughts that don’t necessarily go in a tweet, status update, or elsewhere. Sometimes I get lonely at night and bring out that list again, but for all other times, it’s just the keyboard and I.
When I talk about eight being a pathetically small number for a blog in a week, think of the times where you’ve visited the site and found all (12?) of the posts on the front-page to be different from the last time you visited. Hopefully this isn’t a huge number, and with any luck, it’ll be zero. While I believe in having awesome new content as often as possible, sometimes there are too many things on these big, bad internets, and some things don’t make the cut. That being said, if I ever put some ridiculous number of things up in a day, I officially allow you to come over to my house and trash my room. Or whatever makes you feel good.
Don’t get me wrong, though: I LOVE writing. I’m no Shakespeare, but there’s something intrinsically satisfying about being able to string together words which convey a simple thought, concept, or rambling. That’s just awesome, and being able to do so in a coherent manner ever more so.
So, dear reader, I apologise for what may as well be the umpteenth time for not writing as often as I’d like, and to those who maintain their own (completely user-created) blogs, I salute you. I know full well that you’re a better blogger than I am.