Fresh Ink
The week before last, I was digging around on the internet, and came across Kev Quirk's blog. I spent a decent amount of time reading through his various blog posts, and exploring how his site was setup, quickly realising that I'd quite like to do it myself. This seems fun, I thought! But... this wasn’t a first for me. You see, I've had blogs before - more than one, in fact. Looking at my archived GitHub repositories, there have been at least three. Out of all of these, none of them have stuck around for any more than a year. Not one! So, while pondering the potential existence of this blog, I reflected on why the previous ones “failed”. Two things came to mind.
Firstly, they were repetitive. I created my previous blogs with the intention of only writing about my work in the cyber security industry. While this could have been interesting to both write and read about, writing about threat hunting isn't often at the top of my list after spending 8 hours doing it at work. Instead, I now realise, the blog needs to be an entity of which I am eager to contribute to, not one which I dread to look at because I see it as a chore. I believe a great way to prevent this is to approach it with the intention to write about anything and everything. I shall share my thoughts on travel... or photography. Food. Technology. Art. Finance. How I fixed this thing on that day. The list goes on. By sharing my everyday experiences and reflections, I'll be writing here because I want to, not because I feel I have to. It’ll also add diversity to the topics of my writing, something you as the reader will (hopefully) appreciate.
Secondly, was the severe lack of connection. I’d write a blog post, push it to the site, and it would sit there. Alone. No comments at the bottom. No email address for readers to interact with. I might as well have stored the files on a USB stick in a drawer. Connections, and as a result, conversations, are one of the many things which make life interesting - my previous blogs had none.
To be clear, this wasn’t intended. It was very much of an oversight. In real life, I love meeting new people. It’s one of the reasons I much prefer working in an office than working remotely. That said, I don’t connect with nearly as many people online. While this isn’t inherently bad, it’s a bit of a shame, because there are so many interesting people out there, and the blogging “ecosystem” appears to be a great way to find many.
One explanation for my lack of online connections could be the fact that I don't really use social media, something I’ll write about another time. As a result, I don’t expose myself to all of the potential "connections" other people make on platforms such as Instagram or Facebook. Keep in mind, I use the word connections very lightly, as I think if you asked the average person how many people they really know from their list of followers, it wouldn’t be many.
For me, I much prefer fostering genuine connections and holding meaningful conversations, which brings me to the button at the bottom of this page. You see, at the bottom of every one of Kev’s blog posts, there is a button which reads "Reply by email". When you click this, it launches your mail client with the subject pre-filled, ready for you to write a response to the blog post directly to the author, in this case, Kev. I think this is such a great idea. It results in conversations where both parties are there through intention, and the interest in the topic is genuine. I also find email such a pure form of communication. No fancy styling, no algorithms, just plain text. It feels raw and intentional, something missing from most modern channels of communication and social media platforms.
So, with that in mind, welcome to my new blog.
This time, the topic of posts shall be diverse, and there will be channels of communication between you and me. Thank you to Kev for the encouragement and inspiration to create this blog, and thank you, for taking the time to read my first entry to it. I'd love to hear from you if you're currently working on your own equivalent, or if you've any suggestions of blogs which you think are worth reading.
James