Off the Wall

For someone who rejected the idea of blogging for so long, I’ve made up for lost time.

Last year, I started writing a twice monthly blog for the Linux Journal site, making me one of the few bloggers I know who is actually paid for the hobby. I confess that the blog is more a function of the content management system used by the site, and what I am really writing is articles, but I admit that I enjoy the look on blogging advocates’ faces when they hear that a parvenu like me is getting paid.

Then, in March 2007, I started this blog for personal topics, mostly unrelated to my usual work covering free software and GNU/Linux. It really isn’t a regular blog, either. Instead of keeping a journal, I usually write entries that are short personal essays. The result hasn’t been a runaway success, but the readership is growing nicely for a new blog, and, a couple of weeks ago, my entry “What Makes a Canadian Canadian” received almost six hundred visits in a day.

Left to myself, I probably would have been content to stay at two. However, a few days ago, David Repa from Free Geek Vancouver asked me if I wanted to start writing a blog for that organization’s site. Since I’ve already written a few blog entries here about environmentalism and computing, I agreed.

The experience should be interesting. Like many people, I’ve always been vaguely supportive of environmental topics, but I confess that I was originally more interested in the free software side of Free Geek’s efforts. However, I’m less ignorant that I was a month ago, and with luck I’ll be less ignorant a month from now than I am now.

I already have enough topics for my first four or five entries. Bar disasters, I’ll be posting the first entry on the Free Geek Vancouver site some time in the next few days.