Why Blog?
You've always got to blog in this world, if you want to get ahead. If you can't afford to hire someone to blog for you, that is.
And by this world, I mean the exciting world of making money using the internet. Everybody's doing it! Hacker News told me so. You'll never make a dime if you don't blog, they told me.
I've done the blogging thing before, mind you. Back when I was freelancing, I ran http://blog.adambard.com/. I haven't posted to it in over a year now, and even then I was posting every few months. But those were the freelancing days. I miss freelancing. But now I'm a 9-5 employee at a technology company where I help them do their science better, and that's good too. Besides, when I was freelance I spent all my time freelancing, when I wasn't blogging about freelancing or working on my portfolio or trying to use themeforest to sell a few templates to pay the bills; now I get to have side projects. I have work and I have play, and during play I usually code.
So what am I coding? Geez, I wish I had a better answer to that.
I've got a nice big project morguefile. It's right there on the hard drive of my laptop that died last month. I haven't gotten around to recovering the hard drive yet, and I can't really remember anything. The only one that ever made it onto the Internet was an invoicing application I wrote called Tasksy. You can find my signoff from that here.
Big deal, so what have I done lately?
First off, I registered http://vicdentists.com and http://viclistings.com. Local business directories are where the big money lives, I hear. I've done some SEO, so I figure I can pull in a few adsense bucks and maybe make some dimes off the featured listings. But that's just to pay for the hosting (shout to slicehost and linode, both are spectacular). I scraped some listings (Thanks to hpricot) from the first site I could find that didn't have a notice saying not to.
I wrote a wee app to improve the interface when it comes to catching a bus in my town. That lives at http://dev.adambard.com/bus. I'm working on a full-fledged API so that I can scrape transit routes, stops and times into Google's transit format. BC Transit won't answer my emails, but maybe I can sell them that.
But, I know I said money up there, and none of the above suggest any of that coming my way. But that's not my big idea. I'm still working on that. I'll tell you all about it when I have it.