Friday, February 03, 2012

My Simplistic Tech-Blogging Rationale

English: PROJECT MERCURY - LITTLE JOE TEST - S...Image via Wikipedia
I am not a tech expert.

The last real programming I did was in the 1980s, in Commodore BASIC. My HTML/web design skills (other than tweaking out-of-the-box stuff like Wordpress themes here and there, with reference materials and redundant backups close at hand) are circa the late 1990s.

The *nix command line doesn't terrify me per se, and I've installed, configured and used more distros than I can easily remember, but I'm not the guy you'd call if you needed someone to help you grok grep. Ditto for networking. I've set up and fixed Ethernet and wireless home networks, but you could probably set up or troubleshoot your own as well as I could, assuming you are at least as smart as e.g. a mildly retarded rhesus monkey.

And yet I frequently find myself blogging on "tech stuff," and at some point I figure I owe my readers an explanation (or maybe not -- y'all seem to comment favorably on that as much as on the political material).

Why the simplistic tech-blogging? Three reasons:

  1. As little as I know about any particular thing, I almost certainly know a little more than someone, and therefore may be of assistance.
  2. As little or as much as I know about any particular thing, someone out there almost certainly knows more, and may be willing to share it with me, if I ask (and blogging about it is asking about it, unless comments are turned off and the contact form gets deleted).
  3. Traffic. I keep an eye on entry pages, search engine referrals, etc., and a significant percentage of my hits comes from people searching for the tech items I blog about (the third biggest search referral to KN@PPSTER over the last month, after "not provided" and "knappster," has been "free android apps for tablets") . Which, in addition to constituting a reason itself, tends to confirm the first two reasons.
So anyway, now you know what that's all about. I hopefully get to teach some little things, I definitely get to learn a lot, and it feeds my obsession with traffic numbers. So thanks for putting up with it.
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