Why I write this blog

Posted January 8th, 2010 in Miscellaneous Postings

I thought in this post I would take a look at some of the reasons that I write this blog. It started back in 2003 with fairly irregular postings and it wasn't until about 2008 that I started posting with any real regularity.

To give back and help other people

I must read dozens of websites every day and am constantly learning from other people. I subscribe to several hundred RSS feeds and follow a number of people on Twitter to keep up to date with useful knowledge relating to web development especially PHP, MySQL, HTML/CSS and jQuery. And I search Google a lot when I need an answer for a problem.

Part of writing this blog is to give back to the community so that I may in turn help other people to solve their problems and to learn techniques, tips and tricks they might have otherwise not known. You will find that the articles I post here are a combination of tutorials, dealing with a specific error or problem, and in some cases fairly basic concepts.

To further my knowledge and understanding

In writing content on this blog I often learn a lot more about the concept I am trying to explain. This is because I need to ensure I fully understand it myself and that I can communicate it effectively. I often more thoroughly test code I have already written because it will be scrutinised by more people than just myself, so I want it to be right.

I believe I have become a much better web programmer by writing content for this blog.

As an easy reference point for myself

There's often a lot of really simple concepts explained on this blog and in a lot of cases it's so I have an easy reference place to go get code I commonly need. I often can't remember how exactly to do something, so write up a quick post and then in the future know I can quickly pop over to my blog and find it there, without having to search Google again for the answer.

To make money

Yes, I do also write this blog to make money, although it's taken a long time to do so.

Until recently there was only Google Adsense ads on the site and the clickthroughs and earnings from that has always been low, but with the large increase in pageviews through 2009 I have been able to make a reasonable amount of money in the last couple of months from various other advertising and affiliate channels, enough to finally justify the time I spend writing this blog rather than doing other paid work.

Although, as I mentioned above there are other learning aspects which make writing this blog a rewarding experience as well. And it's always nice to receive emails from people thanking me for solving an issue they had been having.