Fireballer

I have just joined the growing number of people who have bought one of John Gruber’s t-shirts.

I have been reading his blog for a couple of months now and it has almost persuaded me that I really ought to start writing again. Knowing that he manages to make a living off running his website, and that he follows the mantra “We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies”, I am seriously tempted to try and emulate his success here in the UK. I don’t measure his success by the fact that he earns his daily coffee purely from his website, but from the fact that he is regarded as being influential.

Ages ago I used to have a blog with a couple of hundred readers (anybody remember salmagundi?) however I abandoned that when I became a kung fu instructor. Perhaps now that I am back working full time in IT, it is time to pick it back up again and dust my skills off (both as a web-techy and as a writer). Sadly I don’t think I kept a backup of my posts from that era.

It would mean dumping tumblr though. Don’t get me wrong, it is good for the basics, but I will have to roll my own solution to blog write effectively in the manner that I have in mind. Usefully, I recently put a website together which has given me the technical confidence to roll my own blogging platform once again. Salmagundi was based on MovableType - (which is what John Gruber uses) and markdown. As an aside I first came across John’s work through markdown. I still think markdown is an excellent concept and I now regularly make use of the markdown plugin in gvim (and macvim). While on the subject of what I might rework, ads are also on the list, as I am not yet familiar enough with Google’s recent ads changes, and some research on the web based ads competition is needed.

So this theoretical project list in the short term means writing/scripting/configuring/testing my new website engine. I would almost certainly base it on drupal, either version 6 or the beta version 7 (i.e. bleeding edge) depending on how long it takes me to get round to it. In the medium term I would need to host my website somewhere and I have recently been looking at a bunch of VPS providers both here in the UK (local service and support, in theory better for my readers in the UK) and in the US (better reliability, different concept of customer service, higher bandwidth availability and quicker scaling, but above all lower cost). However for it to work at all I would need to write consistently, frequently, relevantly and build a solid readership (again).

Tall order. At this point I recall one of my favourite quotes from Napoleon Hill:

Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

I just need to believe that I can, and want, to do it (again).