I’m a technologist with over two decades of software development experience and a master’s degree in physics. I’ve lived in the United States for almost half my life but originally hail from the United Kingdom which is why I have a good sense of humour (get it?). I also play the piano a bit, juggle a bit, ride a unicycle a bit, have flown paragliders a bit, cook a bit, etc. etc.
My life as a blogger
I first starting blogging, or writing publicly online using Blogger in 2003 producing The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul which ended in 2009. In 2004 I started the tech focused The Long Dark Tech-Time of the Soul which ended in 2012.
In 2013 I discovered distributed ledger technology also known as “blockchain” although not all DLT implementations use a blockchain. I follow a number of projects that have actual use in the real world and are gaining a significant user base. An early one was Steemit which is a blockchain powered publishing system with a very large and active user base where you can actually earn rewards for your content without advertising. I’ve posted on Steemit as @o1o1o1o since 2017 but have not been active recently.
I was an early adopter of Google+ which IMO was also way superior to Facebook and Twitter for publishing. Sadly it never got enough traction compared to Facebook even though I think it was never meant to be a competitor for personal posting to family and friends. I used it heavily for public publishing and actually met quite a few interesting people through it. I started several communities on G+ with thousands of members and one page I created had tens of thousands of followers although in recent years it was pretty certain 50% or more were just fake accounts, something Google apparently lost interest in combating. I’m sad that they are finally shutting it down but that is typical for Google - they have created so few products that have survived the test of time, most of their successes were acquired from others.
Although originally a skeptic since 2015 as I stopped posting on G+ as much I started posting on Twitter as @enmodo (a combination of Engadget and Gizmodo). The increase in post size certainly helped but Twitter is really not a great medium for posting any substantial content and unless you’re a big star prettty much everything you post gets lost in the noise. Plus it is a lousy medium for engaging with commenters.
I’ve been using Reddit a bit more recently, especially as a replacement for G+ groups and I think it is definitely a good community/group medium but I don’t feel like blogging my personal stuff there. Medium has also been something I’ve used but I got annoyed that they want to charge me to read stuff on Medium even though I’m a publisher there, and they don’t have any way for me to be rewarded for content generation. It’s a good service but I don’t really feel like pay $50 a year for it.
So eventualy I decided to start posting again here using GitHub pages and a Jekyll powered blog because I wanted to capture some of my original content and thoughts in a place where I have 100% control over it, it will probably last for ever, and I don’t have to pay anything. Being a daily GitHub user in my job and a big Markdown fan Jekyll works perfectly for me. I have yet to figure out how comments will work - for now I expect to post links to Twitter and elsewhere which could capture some feedback. I believe there are several solutions including Disqus that can work with Jekyll.