Five Reasons Why I Blog

I’m pretty bad with memes, I’ve been tagged a couple of times and not gone through with it. Then Laura from Writing Thoughts tagged me with the five reasons why I blog meme. This got me thinking about whether I could produce five reasons or if this was all a futile effort on my part! Well, here I go, here are my reasons for blogging.

To learn about the web

Not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about blogging, but this really was why I started. My aim at the moment is to get into web development and having concentrated on my studies in maths, computer science and student drinking over the last 3 years I consequently have very little experience with websites, be it building or running them. Owning a blog encourages both of those activities, I’ve redesigned this site once already, ensuring the first time round it was valid HTML and now valid (X)HTML, and now know more about CSS (valid too, by the way) then I could ever find out just by reading about it. As I continue to learn about different facets of the web, like javascript and PHP as well as platforms like Wordpress I post about them and my experiences with them.

To learn to write

Another by product of a 3 year maths degree was 3 years spent scribbling nothing more than a few symbols on a page every week. You may have noticed that I don’t have the most polished writing style, but as I blog I find that it gets easier every time. In the world of work, equations and proofs don’t help as much the ability to write and present information well.

To make a bit of money

Not really a strong desire, but I have always believed that money is important and finding ways of making it without really trying (hey, I was going to write this blog anyway!) is a bonus. If you know me in real life, you will probably have heard about my first real website, the now dead onlinepay.tk. It was a failed initiative, but one that taught me a lot. Sliding some Adsense ads down the sidebar of this blog is much less intrusive than pushing wild and sure to fail money making schemes on my friends and it gives me another incentive to write well and try to gain some sort of popularity!

To show off

If I am ever going to work in web development, I am going to have to be able to show what I can do. What better than to display both my knowledge and my skill (ha!) than with my own blog. It is somewhere I make an effort as it is something I want to be both comfortable in and proud of.

To make a difference

If there is one reason I started blogging, it is down to the first real blogs I read. Blogs like 456 Berea Street, mezzoblue, Snook and Stop Design all gave me an insight into the world of web development, the thought processes of those that are at the top of the industry and overall taught me new and important things about the web. Only a year ago all the websites I had designed and built used tables for layout and looked horrible. By observing others doing it better, I improved and I hope that I can reproduce this sometime in the future. If I can help someone, make a difference to just one person, then I have succeeded on both important levels, learning and imparting knowledge.

I’m not great at memes, I said that earlier, so I feel bad tagging others. But you don’t have to be tagged to take part. Why do you blog? It doesn’t matter how deep or important the reasons are or how many reasons there are, but I am interested. Make a post about it or just drop me a comment, I’m easy!

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