This is a weblog[ref]Why I like the blog as a medium
I don’t trust my Facebook self. Yours either. Facebook is so share-crazy and interactive that you’re reaching out before you’re done with your piece, or your thought. Plus your “stream” isn’t even your stuff—it’s just a pile of link bait. I want to give myself the time and place to write and to form complete thoughts. Position things. Archive work. To focus on the writing rather than on the being read, really. For that, the blog seems ideal. Particularly with this beautiful, medium-like theme, Independent Publisher. Great-looking and just the thing, Raam Dev. Thanks!
The lowly, hoary blog! I was blogging fifteen years ago. Same site, too: brownhen.com, whose name comes from a Wallace Stevens poem. Funny.
Plus I’m a web developer. An information architect. I realize how fulfilling building things can be. As simple as that is, it’s really crystalized for me recently. Build things. I just heard someone say somewhere, “Enough downloading. Start uploading.” The blog gives you a place to write and buid, to change site structure, mess with WordPress and PHP, test plugins, build little JavaScript thingies. Whatever. It’s perfect!
The blog is like this perfect-sized…thing. A project. You can mix subjects, as I do with Tech and Writing. “Cultivate” seems like a relevant, ambitious word here.
[/ref] written by Ian Oeschger[ref]That’s me. Inspired partly by an episode of the podcast Developer Tea, I’m starting my blog back up to encourage myself to write and publish[/ref].
Ian Oeschger (@oeschger) is a writer, a mentor at tekMountain, a former bookstore owner, co-founder of the Cape Fear Economic Development Council (CFEDC), and a right-brained software developer for @IBMCommunity.
He’s also an avid reader and local do-good volunteer in Wilmington, NC. He consults as an architect and web developer for bookstore trade organizations, environmental impact firms, education technologists, and others. He’s worked at a number of start-ups in the Silicon Valley, including Netscape, where he contributed to and published broadly on the open source project Mozilla. Before All That, he was a bookstore owner, an English major, English teacher, and an award-winning fiction writer, among other things.