A few weeks ago I told a client that they shouldn’t have a blog for their software product unless they were willing to maintain it. I am going to take my own advice, and reaffirm my dedication to my home on the internet: lambie.org.

I think that the undertaking only has value if I consider two questions: does my blog, and blogging in general, still hold value, and what caused me to lose interest in lambie.org over the past 12 months?

Most people used to read my blog through themadpeeps.com.au, which collects feeds from most of our friends that blog. A quick check shows that there’s still a few articles trickling through each month, but the activity has definitely dropped off. I think there’s been an overall decline in social blogging, amongst my friendship circles at least.

I think that we’re are moving to short-format systems, like Twitter and Facebook status updates to let people know about the things that are going on in their lives. I believe I’ve fallen into that group too and it’s been a factor in reducing my lambie.org activity. Paraphrasing someting I read (ironically, as a tweet) the other day:

I heard someone say they wished you could express themselves in more than 140 characters, to which I replied “you can; start a blog.”

I usually have more than 140 characters of stuff to say.

I have also been writing a few articles on our company blog, which is where I’ve been putting all the relevant technical or work-related articles for the last year or so. Some of the most popular articles I’ve written have been about technical topics, like Connecting to MS SQL with Ruby on Ubuntu, The Right Way to Get a Rails Project into Subversion and the 6-years-old-but-relevant SSH Auto-authentication.

Above all of this though, lambie.org gives me an outlet for creative writing. Certainly I write every day as part of my job, but the scope for creativity is limited. lambie.org gives me an avenue to express myself, and I should not overlook that.

Therefore, whilst I believe the value of blogging has been reduced over the past 12 month or more, the value of lambie.org is still high, if only to me.

As an experiment, and potential ego maker/breaker, if you still read lambie.org leave a comment and let me know. Whilst I write for myself (heck, doesn’t every blogger without an audience say that?) it’s still nice to know that others might sometimes read my ramblings.

With the start of a new decade, I declare that you can expect to see new articles here every week or so, as I try to get my online life back on track.