Blogtastic June 7, 2009
Posted by mwidlake in Blogging.Tags: Blogging
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I wonder how many blog entries world-wide have the title “blogtastic” or “blogging about blogs” or something similar.
I’ve been blogging properly for about 3 weeks now. Why did I start? 3 main reasons.
- I forget stuff {I’m getting to that age} so I thought a blog was as good a place as any to stick stuff where I could find it.
- I like to teach. I know, it sounds a bit naff, but I honestly like explaining things and teching people stuff. If I was starting out on my career again, I would do more training.
- Narcisism. There has to be an element of wanting to be noticed in anyone who blogs! I’d like to be a “C” list Oracle Name
After a few weeks blogging, what have I learned?
- I really like it when I get comments. It is less like talking to an empty room.
- I am talking to an empty room! When I linked back to my blog from Jonathan Lewis’s blog my hits jumped from a half dozen to 80. They are heading back to a half dozen now.
- Google does not pick up stuff just because it is on a blog. Which is maybe good as think how many spurious hits you would get for 99% of stuff and it is bad as, not only are people missing out on the great stuff I say, more worryinlgy, when I ask Google about some aspect of Oracle I know nothing about, how much great stuff am I missing?
- It takes a lot of time to do rigorous explanations of oracle facts, which is what I have always demanded from my Oracle sources (and is why I use “-burleson” in my google searches).
I know my blogs are too long, I’ve been told. But then, they are supposed to be for my own benefit and I like to see why I decided what I think I know.
It takes a loooong time to say what you want to say. I’ve put a few basic techie things up and have not touched on my 2 other areas, VLDB and management. It is going to take me a long time to put down things I want to put down. I have a list of , ohhh, maybe 50 things to blog about already.
And last for now? It’s addictive. I want to put down everything now.I want people to find and read my blog now. I want my stats to be high.Why? Narcisism of course
But also because if I’m going to teach people there has to be people listening.
And really for last. Why do I want to teach? Well, the post on Consistent Gets says it all. When you teach people, you learn. The hardest questions often come from people who know the least about a topic.

Thank you for blogging I enjoy reading you and I see the same effect when I do a commit on Jonathan Lewis’s Blog
By the way it would be nice you put catagorization and archive of your posts so we dont have to use the calender only.
Hi Coskan. Thanks for the feedback.
I do use categories and tags, plus I put ping backs to earlier posts on the same topic, but I’ll think if I can make navigation easier. My blogs are very verbose. I was going to put a category on the side bar for “best bits” but I did not feel I could do that after only 3 weeks!
I hope you continue to visist and get something out of the blog.