So Here We Go Again...
Blog Take... 🤔
Ok... so this will be my 4th, maybe 5th time at starting a blog. I have always like the idea of a blog. I think it appeals to my sense of sharing things that I find interesting with others whether they wanted to hear it or not 😃. Typically, I find myself to be engrossed in actually building the blog than I do with writing the content (perhaps a good blog post 😀). I wanted to take a moment and think through why some of the blog ideas in the past failed and what I hope this site will be.
A look back
My first step in to blogging was back when blogs were really just becoming a thing. In the early to mid 2000's it was the wild west. There were several platforms such as blogger, blogspot, etc. Social media had started to come about and it was becoming easier to "share" your content with a broader audience. I was just finishing college when I thought maybe now was the time to start one of these blog things. So I signed up for blogspot and started a blog. I have racked my brain trying to think of what that first blog was called. I think it was something grand like ptallen.blogspot.com...
This one failed before it really got started. First, I am not a writer (we'll get to how that affects this particular blog). Second, there were just other things I wanted to do other than just sit and write. I was really in to the college experience and did not find time to write. Even the few times I said I was going to write something, there was nothing that came to mind to write ¯_(ツ)_/¯ .
We get global
In 2009 I had been out of college for a few years and ended up taking a job that took me to Cairo, Egypt. I was also coming fresh from the banking industry. Well... this is when my creativity really shined through. I thought that since I had been a banker, and I was now in Africa, let's create a blog called .... TheAfricanBanker.com . Yeah so, early on I found out naming things was not my strongest attribute. Not to mention that this was a pretty confusing title considering the author was a white guy from the US.
Questionable naming decisions aside, the side was super exciting for me because it is one of the first sites I ever built for the web. I learned so much about HTML, DNS, and XML (I'm a bit old 👴). The site was quite a snazzy table layout with a left sidebar, complete with an accordion style menu. The one thing it did not have... Content. Yeah... my achilles heal of creating a blog was actually making content. However, this was not a failure in the since that I learned a ton, which is a constant theme of all the blogs I have tried to make.
It's 2013, you need a blog
So time had passed and I had moved back to the states and married the love of my life. At the time of writing this post we have been married going on 9 years 👰🤵. I had started a job in the higher education space, but I had really gotten into my hobby of software development. I had been learning it on the side ever since Egypt. I honestly could not get enough of it. As I was building my skills, I decided that it was high time a software enthusiast such as myself should his own website. And hey, while we are at, lets just have a ... you know a really original idea... a blog! So I create paultallen.com to serve as my online resume. Because I wanted to have a solid blog to show off, I created another creative masterpiece, blog.paultallen.com.
Again I went to work building this site. Again I learned so much. By this point, my little hobby of software development had gone into full blown obsession. For this blog I spent so much time building everything from the ground up. I built my own CMS (think Wordpress). It was such a fun time, but I bet you can guess why this blog never took off. Yep, that's right... no content. I had all these ideas about posts, but could never pick one.
I guess I am pretty good at email
By early 2017 I had moved into the work of marketing technology. I had made a name for myself as an expert in emailing and I was teetering dangerously close to actually turning my hobby of software development into a profession. Since I had become somewhat knowledgable in my industry, I said to myself, NOW IS THE TIME FOR A BLOG! You know since I have a great track record at being successful at one of these. This time I was going to attack the problem at the root. I spent lots of time thinking through different pieces of content to share and to write about. Hey I was telling people how to work with marketing tech for a living, why not write about it. This is where OpenedByDesign.com was born. The name coming from the thought that went into creating a subject line of an email that encourage a reader to open it. My usual F grade on naming blogs and improved to a C- in my opinion
What really led to this blog not making was I got to organized in trying to create a process to create content. My problem has always been that I like creating a system rather than using the system. And OBD.com was no exception. I learned so much with this blog and had a blast building, but when it came to creating content, just could not find myself to get to writing.
So, why is this different?
This brings us to this blog... ADoseOfRandom.com. I would like to think that the name is a bit more aligned with what I want to do, which is just share content about what I am getting up to. This blog's aim is less towards producing content for others to read ( I won't complain if they do 😉), and focusing more on getting me to write and share about life. You see I am not the most gifted with words and I am not the best at recording the memories of life, or sharing my thoughts, ideas, and observations. So for me, this is a vessel to learn. As all my blogs have been, I aim to learn more about something by doing something. Most of the time I end up learning about something that I did not expect. I am hoping this installment of me trying to create a blog is no different. A home run is if I could share those learnings here in the process. So here's hoping this new adventure works out and if you want to join me in it, I would love the company 😀