Planning to blog but not blogging to plan

As this is a new blog I sat down in the week and drew up a plan. In the plan it said things like. Choose a direction to go in (technology, photography, etc). Write x number of articles a week. Make certain changes changes to the blog to make it more user friendly.

I sat down on the train and started to draft a blog entry and this isn't it. What I have already learned in my short blogging time is that things change. What I started to write then I don't want to publish now. You see I'm a technology person, a logical person, everything needs a plan. Not necessarily a project plan or an implementation plan but at least know your next steps. Right or wrong? Well I think both actually.

When I started my first blog I wrote one post, a year later I wrote my second post and then abandoned it.  A few weeks ago I started a new blog on a different web site which I outgrew within the week and now here I am on blogger.

I mentioned in my About page that I have number of different interests and I didn't know what would surface here. I have decided that it will probably be all of them. You see it's like this.

In certain respects a plan can be good. I need to know where my blog is going technically in terms of look and feel and presentation. I want it to have a clean and simple interface, an easy to ready font, headings that aren't too big, etc. So when I see something I want to change I'll put it on a list and decide the order of preference and when I might work on that job.

I tried to do this with my writing, it doesn't work. I can sit down and write on a given topic, eventually; but what I actually want to write about is what  grabs me now.

I'm a subscriber to a newsletter from BNET, it goes to my work email address. It's supposed to inspire me but often goes straight to the Trash folder as I don't have time to be inspired. Yesterday was different. I saw a reference to an article from Penelope Trunk headed 'How to Tweet Infrequently and Gain a Huge Following'.

OK I was hooked "Twitter" and "Following" did it for me. I was there. I wont repeat it here, read it for yourself.

I was straight over to Penelopes blog and darn it I was hooked again. As well as a great blog interface the first article contained the word camera. I was writing my about page so had to check that out and then 'Penelope's guide to starting a blog'.

This last article which is quite extensive really has convinced me to abandon my 'writing plan' and write about what grabs me at the time.

Just to prove that a little research goes a long way one of the articles talks about the Lifehacker website (couldn't resist a link after reading that one!). But wow what a interesting site. Being a Linux advocate I was immediately drawn by an article on the home page about the best Linux downloads of 2010 which fleetingly talked about Linux Mint the Operating System version I use, LMDE to be exact. So little detail ... I might just have to expand on it for them.

Until then ......