Today marks the first anniversary of my first entry in the Gryphon Mountain Journals. I can’t believe that I have been blogging that long already.

One day early in 2008, esteemed colleague Tom of I’d Rather Be Writing fame told me that I should start a blog. I may have scoffed. What would I blog about? I didn’t know. But he had put the idea in my head, and I couldn’t get it out.

Soon after, Tom presented at an Intermountain STC chapter meeting. He talked about getting started and some concerns and challenges that accompany blogging. I asked how an aspiring blogger chooses a topic, and he said, “Blog about what you’re passionate about.”

Since writing is my favorite thing, that became my topic.

Tom gave me some guidance while I went through WordPress.org‘s instructions for setting up a blog on your own domain. I already had the Web space because I had bought my domain name with nebulous plans. Since I had pretty much stuck myself within the “Gryphon Mountain” concept, I decided to go with it. I picked a WordPress theme that had the general layout I wanted—header, main column on the left, sidebar on the right, and footer—and reworked the rest of the CSS pretty substantially to get my own theme.

My first couple of posts describe more of my thoughts about starting out as a blogger. I set a goal to post four times a week for the first few months; sometimes I exceeded it, and other times I fell short. Sometimes I feel like blogging, and sometimes I don’t. It’s fun when within a couple of days I get a bunch of ideas, enough to write about for the next week or two. Sometimes, life at work gets so busy that I have to stop and think about what has happened that’s interesting enough to write about.

I blog to help my brain process events and ideas in my field so that they are more meaningful. I blog in the hopes that something I say may carry some value for someone else. I blog because it’s an excuse to write more than software documentation. I think over the last year I’ve been able to better define why I blog, and I think I’m less shy about publicly writing.

In case you’re curious, since hardly anyone was reading when I started, here are the first couple of posts:

Thanks for reading!

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  5. Guest Post on I'd Rather Be Writing