One of my good friends, Jason Strate (Blog | Twitter) has come up with a new meme topic that we can blog on each month. The topic revolves around Social Networking each month. This month’s topic is on blogging. The questions Jason asked us are, “Why did you start blogging and why do you currently blog?”
History
The blogging topic got me thinking and digging into the past. It wasn’t easy for me to recall the date of my actual first blog. I do know it was a long time ago. In order to find an estimate of that time, I took the Wayback Machine for a ride.
When it comes to helping in the community, it started for me around December of 2001. At this point in my technical life, not only were databases inspiring me to learn more but web development was the cool of cool. That year I started giving back by being an active participant in the forums. Now, when I say active, I mean it consumed my entire day, every day of the week. I couldn’t get enough of it! Answering and helping people with problems was a drug. We can only have so many problems that need fixing in our own jobs and that mystery around a problem simply sucked me in every time. I always wanted to be the one to figure it out. I owe that mentality to a lot of what I know about not only database servers but networking, hardware and development.
The forums went on for a few years. I made some great friends like Denis, Eli and George from it all. During this time, I started a side business for consulting. The first thoughts were web development but quickly turned into just about everything. That created the website onpnt.com. onpnt.com was primarily my gateway to side jobs but quickly turned into another way for me to help others by writing blogs on it. Now, there were only a few blogs. Things mostly on Classic ASP (remember, this was in 01 to 04) Classic ASP was the shiznit back then. I do not have backups of the site at that time but thankfully to the Wayback Machine, here is a snapshot with the highest visited blog on Guest Books written in Classic ASP.
So to answer the question of, why? I just want to help people fix problems and make all of us better. This starting from way back in ~2004 when the blog on ASP was published above, up to now as a blogger on LessThanDot. LessThanDot started my blogging back up. My writing has focused on SQL Server mostly but I still try to share anything that will be helpful to others. The reason that started back up was from one thread on the site. One question from another good friend, Mark Smith (Blog), caused my first LessThanDot Blog and the blogging fest that has led me up to over 200 posts to date.
Current Blogging
The reason I started is the same reason I do it today. Share the wealth! Help others become better and more knowledgeable in SQL Server and everything that is around it. To me, there truly is nothing better than having a person directly thank you for a blog you wrote. It is a feeling that I can’t imagine anyone would ever want to stop happening.
My meme…
I started blogging because I wanted to help in another way other than forums. I currently blog because I persist with the attitude that helping only makes all of us better. I may not be the greatest at writing. My lack of an educational background, that is common of most other people at my level, may show my grammar inabilities at times, but nonetheless, I’ll blog and keep doing it for the one person that may find that one blog useful. And I bet Jes Borland (Blog | Twitter) is dying right now from the comma use in that last sentence 🙂
