Blogger's Block #1: Joelprah

Part 1 of an N-part series of short posts intended to clear out my bloggestive tract. Hold your nose!

Ever since my last entry I've had blogger's block. Haven't been able to write a thing. I've tried, but haven't made any progress on anything.

Partly it's because I hinted I'd be writing about a controversial technical topic next. I was going to, but I can't seem to bring myself to talk about it. I've tried exactly umpteen approaches, many of them over half finished. None of them quite hit the mark. You make a promise like that, and I think you'll find it hard to keep. I know I have.

It's also partly because I was finishing up a long-ish project at work, and then I went on a much-needed vacation for 2 weeks. Of course I just stayed at home and worked on a new Ruby on Rails site, which might not sound like much of a vacation to you, but if you've been working with the web technologies I've been working with lately... let's just say RoR is like having a pillow surgically removed from your face. I can breathe again.

Incidentally, my game-and-blog server has been down for a week, since I decided to shepherd it into our current century by upgrading from RedHat 7.3 to the latest Ubuntu. Wow. Ubuntu rocks. Everything just works, including apt-getting a smp kernel and rebooting. So now I can drag the server back to the dismal concrete bunker in downtown Seattle where my ISP hosts the thing.

I moved the old Drunken Blog Rants, though. They're now all hosted in
pages.google.com. They were (inexplicably, as always) getting a lot of traffic, and it was really eating into the CPU and bandwidth for my game, so I've moved them to a place where they'll presumably have better latency and availability. When my old server comes back online, I've just told Apache to do permanent redirects for the 50-odd articles.

Putting them in Google Pages was pretty easy. I eventually wound up getting to where I could port one in about 90 seconds, so the whole exercise only took a few hours. It really was the perfect place to host them: they're mostly static content, and I just needed a permanent place for them to live. Google has a way of creating things I actually use. Blogger's just good enough. The spreadsheet is just good enough (I use it for my diet log). Google Pages is just good enough. And so on. I'm living more and more in my browser now because of Google.

I work there now, you know. A teeny fish in a big ocean of brilliant people. I'll blog about that a bit in one of my upcoming bloguettes, I think.

So where was I? Oh yeah. Blogger's block. It wasn't just the Mystery Tech Topic that's had me blocked, nor was it entirely the vacation. There are some other weird things going on, and I'm going to have to learn to deal with them or I'll never be able to write anything again.

First, my blog got really popular after Joel Spolsky linked to it. That guy is like the Oprah Winfrey of tech blogging. Yeah, I watch Oprah. I can't help it. When my wife's watching it, I try to ignore it as best I can. But then I sneak a peek, or I laugh at one of her jokes or one of her guests' jokes, and then I'm hooked until it's over. My wife Linh says Oprah is the most powerful woman in the U.S. Linh says that if Oprah told every woman in the United States to go jump off a cliff, they'd do it. Oprah, don't do it!

Well, if Joel told all the techies to go jump off a cliff, I'm sure only a handful of them would do it, probably just the parkour wannabes. But when he tells them all to go read my blog... well, I used to get a max of 8,000 to 9,000 hits a day. After Joel linked to me a couple of times, about 70,000 people came and peered at my blog, most of them newcomers.

After your blog gets that popular, even for a little while, you'd better grow a thick skin fast. I've seen people praise Joel and bash on Joel (more of the former, generally), and I've been able to read both sides with interest but without emotion. Just try doing the no-emotion thing when they're talking about YOU.

I mean 70,000 people is like a stadium-full. Imagine all of them glaring at you. Imagine them wanting to lynch you! Some of them did!

So I'd been planning to write an entry once a week, even a small one, and thanks to the Mystery Topic and Oprah-Joel and my work project and my vacation and whatnot, I haven't posted in over a month.

To help me overcome this block-thing, I'm just going to post small stuff for a while. It's the #1 rule of blogging, you know: when in doubt, spew it out. If you say something incredibly stupid and insensitive, no big deal, everyone will just despise you.

D'oh.

Well, we'll see how it goes. Maybe writing short articles will help. I have a whole bunch of things queued up that I'd like to write about. Maybe just writing about them will clear this whole blog-constipation problem up, and I can get back to pooping out entries with my usual, um, ah... my metaphor has stretched to the breaking point here... with my usual "aplomb". Ahem.

If that fails, I might just start writing under a pen name. Heck, my blogs would probably be a lot better for it, and more frequent to boot.

This is a hard problem. We'll see how it goes!