Ideas for Blog Posts

Last week, I looked at my blog stats and realized that I’ve been getting far far more visitors than ever before.  August had over 700 views!  In a fit of passion, I promised on Twitter to write 7 new blog posts in September.

Unfortunately, I’ve been really busy so far this month and every day after I finish my work, I’m too tired to think of a good topic.  Now it’s already halfway through the month and I’ve only written two posts.  Therefore, I’m asking for some help.  What do you think my next post should be about?  There’s a poll below with a few broad topics I know about, and if you have anything more specific in mind (like a particular post title?), you can put it in the comments.  After three or four days, I will check the results and write a really good article on whatever wins.

Bespoke Row Blog

I recently started a new blog for Bespoke Row – [updated 2010/09/08] Now it’s hosted at http://www.bespokerow.com/blog.

Hello World!

As you can see, I decided to go with WordPress for my blog. It has a number of features that I like (categories, many RSS feeds, trackbacks, etc.), some nice themes, I can host it myself and import all my previous posts from Blogger, and it’s easy to use.

My purpose in writing this blog is to practice writing and thinking critically as well as to represent myself on cyberspace. To that respect, I’ve set up a number of categories that I think will be useful:

• personal: Just what it sounds like – events from my life. I don’t think I’ll post to this category very often. http://daugherty.mit.edu/category/personal
• tech: Current tech news/my thoughts on technology and technology trends. This will probably be mainly web-oriented software news, but you never know. http://daugherty.mit.edu/category/tech
• my-software: Any updates or thoughts on software on which I am currently working. Hopefully with links to really cool prototypes that you will enjoy trying out. http://daugherty.mit.edu/category/tech/my-software
• mit: Events at the institute, thoughts on classes, speeches, career fairs, etc. http://daugherty.mit.edu/category/mit

Also, one of the cool features of WordPress is that it supports RSS feeds for almost everything on the site. I know I have a few readers who aren’t as familiar with some of this technology as I am, so here’s a quick explanation on how to use it, with an example of adding my site to your Google homepage.

First, find the URL for a feed about any page for which you would like to receive updates. Just append “feed” to the end of the URL. For example, the feed for my main site is http://daugherty.mit.edu/feed, and the feed for the personal category is http://daugherty.mit.edu/category/personal/feed.

Second, go to your personalized homepage in Google and click “add more to this page >>” in the upper left corner. Now, click “add by URL” to the right of the search box. Finally, type in the URL you created before into the box and click “Add”. Navigate back your homepage and check it out. Cool, huh?

My next steps with the blog will be to start posting more, to customize the appearance, and to add a few more static pages about me. Thanks for checking out my new blog; I hope you enjoy it!