AnOSM Blog Story: After One Year

Story behind this blog is a long one and I would try to keep it short, just giving the relevant details and cutting off the fluff (and putting in the facts to the best of my memory).

This all started during the January of 2007. I was preparing for my engineering entrances. Around that time I got my hands on a short book about blogging. I knew just a little bit about blogs, then. I read the book from cover to cover and after reading it, I knew I wanted to have a blog of my own, one day.

But the problem was that I didn't have an Internet connection at home (broadband was just getting popular). And I wanted to have only good comprehensive researched articles on my blog (which, now I know, nobody reads!). And I wanted to have a regular set of readers who would expect consistency. I did make an account on Blogger and reserve a domain, played a little bit with the layout and so on. I also wrote 2-3 lines on the blog, promising to come back and write more but that never really came.

Then I got admission in college and other things took importance, one of my friends by that time had started his own blog and I always encouraged him to write more & more and better & better; because in a way I used to imagine, someday my blog also getting the similar kinds of reactions. In fact, whenever I came to know about any blog of my friends, I have made it a point to actually read it and comment. By doing that I was creating a ready-made followers for my own blog, without even starting it yet! (But my comments were and will always be genuine :).

Then during the winters of 2007-2008, I said "what the heck, let me start the blog, if it fails, then so be it". So, I wrote an article on the ongoing India-Australia test series (Cricket is one of the easiest topic an Indian can get to blog on!). But I never really got to publishing that one (again not having a net connection was the reason and pen drives weren't fully popular by then, so transferring data was also a pain).

So, again it went into a cold bag. Now, there is nothing more stressing than a work half done. While I got busy clearing the semesters, the thought of making the blog always remained buried inside. During the start of 2010 when I finally got an Internet connection, it was a perfect opportunity to start the blog, so I did go around in reserving a domain again and writing a short blog post.

But again there was this flaw in thinking, that my blog posts should be large and comprehensive to be taken seriously. So, once again I couldn't go beyond the first post (which was just an introduction and nothing else).

During the summer-break of 2010, I came up with another idea (I am usually good in devising ideas, it's the implementation that's mainly the problem :). The plan was that instead of writing a blog, why not go short and start a mini-blog of sort. So, I wrote this post to 8 of my closest friends. And after a writer's block of 1-2 weeks it finally started!

Writing blogs also follows the principle of inertia. When you haven't written for a long time, it is just kind of hard to start again. But once you somehow start writing (and posting) and getting encouraging responses, you are on a roll, and you start to crank up posts after posts. If you check out the archives section and see the the dates of my blog posts, you will see that my writing was stuck at least 2-3 times, but there have also been time, where I posted 2-3 times per week.

But persistence is the key. I persisted while facing difficulties and here we are! This blog is over one year old! Today I have a full fledged blog with over 50 posts and set of low numbered but consistent readers (friends :)! Hopefully, in next one year we will make it even bigger & better :)