November 30, 2019

The history of the blog

When there is nothing to write about, something must be invented. A possible argument is to retrace the path taken from the beginning to the present moment. In other words, describe the history of a work since its start. If a blog has been around for a long time, enough material will always be found to fill a page. Give me a moment to browse through the pages and see when the first post was published. It was September 17, 2007, more than 12 years ago. It's a good start because the time frame is long enough to find so many interesting moments in its life that I can talk about. Speaking of statistics, my file in which I keep all the posts is 35 pages and about 16 thousands words. To be honest, it's not a big production; something more then thousand words a year. But let's start from the beginning.

I opened this blog, my first ever (after many others will come), because I heard that there was a lot of talk about personal logs on the Internet. I had visited some and I was not particularly impressed. There were places where people described when they got up, what they ate for breakfast, how and on what basis they chose clothes and shoes to use that day, and all that, and even with intimate details. These diaries were terribly boring to me. There were thematic ones, in which someone presented a secret, tips and tricks of their personal profession and I liked them much more. I decided to try writing on the blog. What will I offer to my potential visitors? The biggest question was: why should I waste time with this? At that point, I realized that websites like this can be very useful to link other sites. Who will I link to? My other works, the most important for me, because their financial potential.

The networks are all around as


When I start a new project, I try to do it well. I'm such a person. Besides, I've always liked giving something to others, being selfless. It is always wise to choose a topic that is familiar, so it is easier to work because the inspiration is based on a particular knowledge that one possesses. Since everything is also directly connected to the Internet, and from that moment I realized that the money came from search engines, the decision fell on writing something that was potentially useful to those who do the same things as me, to webmasters. In my future this decision will create some problems that I didn't immediately comprehend.

At the time my principal activity was programming, creating applications for computer, because it was also one of my favorite pastimes. Not only that I was enjoying myself, I was also doing something useful to get a financial return from this activity. At that time there was a lot of talk about PageRank and I thought it would be nice to be able to calculate the value of the same by myself. It was immediately clear to me that this could not work perfectly because I did not have enough information and, above all, I did not have enough computing power. So I had to do something approximate that could use the data I could easily access. My first articles are almost mathematical in nature, because I was explaining the calculation algorithm, the real one and those mine, simplified. The idea was to make the application available to my visitors, after its completion.

After completing the software, testing it in detail and checking that it was really a good product, I began to have doubts. Giving it away for free means that my competitors will also have useful information. He seemed stupid to me. At one point I thought I'd put it up for sale, but it required extra work that I wasn't ready to accept at that point. A similar problem would occur if I discovered something that most others did not know or did not want to tell to other webmasters. My ego urged me to publish and explain everything so that the whole world could celebrate me, my ingenuity. At the end, I would always conclude that it is better to keep a secret and turn it into money, rather than enjoy the glory; we all know that it lasts briefly. However, in the end I sometimes found a fair compromise between saying and not saying. Those who understood a little more were able to find out where the trick was reading between the lines.

I'm not a literary talent, so I often find it difficult to write a text. I know what I would like to say, but I can't synthesize it and express it in a simple and understandable way. Over the years, my writing style has also improved. Everything went smoother, directly from the brain to the paper (sorry, to the keyboard and then to the screen) and in the end it made sense, at least sometimes. Even today I happen to write something extremely ugly, but my creative process has been greatly improved thanks to years of training. My goal was once a few hundred words, but I often committed even two to three hours to reach that goal. Today I fill out an A4 page in less than an hour, including checking what I wrote.

Social networks
I want to use this space to express my opinion on the phenomenon that has been dominating our civilization for years: social networks. This is my great disadvantage; I simply don't use them. One of the excuses, which makes sense, is that I don't want to make another commitment. It is known that this is a great way to promote the services offered online, but it requires a lot of work and this work must be continuous. It is also convenient to promote something that is really going well and I have some sites that could fall into this category. I gave myself the charge, but I’m not sure that I will respect it, to launch at least one channel next year, to advertise one of my humorous sites. What rejects me from all this, regardless of the need for further effort, is the issue of privacy. Today social networks are the main collectors of data on potential customers and I have no desire to spontaneously enter this category. I have to find a good reason, I would say that the money could be one, to throw me into such an adventure.

It misses only few lines, this that I write now, to reach one of the goals that I rarely reach: write a post with over a thousand words. Today is a really beautiful day. Even the sun shines timidly in the clouds. May it be with you all.