Conception

I don't remember the first time I heard about blogging. It was probably 3 or 4 years ago. Seemed like a fad at the time, though I found a few blogs I admired, notably The Julie/Julia Project, which documented one woman's adventures cooking her way through the writings of Julia Child; Julie's attitude was infectious, and far be it from me to turn down a healthy helping of gastroporn.

Fast forward to this summer, when I read an article about people who made all kinds of passive income on their websites. Having left my job to pursue the financial roller coaster of freelance activities, building a website, and making some bucks on it was pretty appealing. OK, I started to get greedy, dollar signs in my eyes and all that. But seriously, a portal or collection of information that didn't seem to be easily available elsewhere in one place seemed like an honorable contribution to make to the world - not one of those crap lists of mostly dead links designed to exploit Google AdSense, but a value-added, professional-looking creation that people would actually want to use.

Inspired by (younger) friends at 43things I read through a few lessons in html, and my 42-year-old brain rebelled quickly against my quixotic effort to take the web-design world by storm, from scratch. So I looked at a few template sites. Blech. Not to mention that they didn't really do what I wanted them to do.

Then Penelope Trunk, a prolific blogger and freelancer writing about career issues, convinced me that blogging was a great career move. (I'm humbly reminded by Penelope's post of the importance of pithiness. So I will stop here for now. G'night.)
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