Last week at my full time job, a respected colleague asked me a question which provided food for thought. His questions was “Why Do You Blog?”. It was a thought provoking question which I actually had to think about. I do believe I have the answer which I will share but I also thought I would give some back ground on how I got their.
7 years ago I used to change Internet Service Provider’s a lot. I could not find one provider that was consistent on how they provided service. DSL providers would be good for a few months then their service would get bad and I would switch. Every time I switched providers I would have to change email addresses. For a while I used a Yahoo email account to get around this problem of the ever changing email account. Then one day my email account was hacked and I was never able to get it back.
I then did what I always do, some research. After some research I determined the best way to handle these issues was to sign up with a web hosting provider and register my own domain domain. I did a lot of searching and signed up with 1and1.com. At the time they had the best flexibility of packages for what I was looking for. They were also the most reasonable for cost. When I signed up the Cairns-clan.com domain was born. I now had a domain where I could park my email addresses and any addresses that my family wanted as well.
Out of registering the domain, I had also purchased web space. It came with the package. My Uncle Ian was the family historian who was working on updating the Genealogy of the family. The Cairns family history is very interesting. I suggested to my Uncle Ian that we put our history on the web. Out of these discussions the Cairns-clan web site was born.
Around the same time I started to think how I could answer the same IT questions from my friends and family without having to keep answering them over and over. I also wanted to created a set of resource that I could say go here and they would all be on the Internet for them to browse at their leisure. Out of this the-techshop.com web site was born.
The original was website was primitive in comparison to how it is today. The entire site was HTML coded and the information on it was very static. I did not get around to updating the information as much as I should have since it took some time to do. Updates would happen month’s apart. Despite the infrequent updates, I had my resource site. I had links to all the information which my friends and family needed.
After some time, a couple of years ago 1.and1 offered hosted WordPress. For those of you who do not know, WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms on the Internet. I had found my solution. The solution which has shaped where I am today. I transformed my web site from a static HTML site to a hosted WordPress Blog. I finally was in business.
WordPress made my life so much easier but the hosted version of WordPress lacked some of the flexibility which I was looking for. Earlier this spring I made the move from hosted WordPress to self hosted WordPress. Self hosted WordPress means I have control over the database, the plugins, more flexibility and most of all more control.
That is where I am today. I am really happy with my choice. I have moved all my web sites to be WordPress based.
Now that I have gone over the technical back ground on how I got here, the questions still remains “Why Do I Blog?”. One of the biggest reasons is blogging give me a forum to share information with other people. One thing I have also enjoyed is staying up to date in my friend and sharing my knowledge with others. Blogging provides me with the platform to share information.
I like to give back. Sharing information helps other enjoy and understand technology. I love to see other people getting excited about technology. Their is no better way to share then to write about it.
Blogging also gives me flexibility and allows me to keep my site more current. WordPress is an easy content management system (cms) to maintain. It does not take a lot of work to update my WordPress blog or add to it.
Most of all I am part of a community. Blogging helps me to network with other people and has helped me to meet many great people.
