In the blogosphere, I rarely find posts that deal with “struggle”. I think that’s a shame, too. People deal with their struggles in private and post from a position of authority in public after the fact. But, you know, I’d really like to read about the struggle part, because I sure have a lot of them. I want to read about how some guy totally sucked at something or got his ass kicked and then read about the steps he took to not suck so much…and not get his ass kicked. To me, that is not only real, but valuable.

This comes from a post up on Hacker News today. It’s addressing programming blogs, but it sparked a more general thought, mainly that “blogging” has changed since it first hit the Internet scene.

It’s probably not a big revelation to anyone who spends a lot of time online, but that quote helped define something that’s been lurking in the back of my mind, especially now that I’m writing my own blog.

Early blogs were more personal diary. People shared thoughts and feelings, bad writing and uncomfortable revelations included. Although they revolved around certain topics, some as “emotionless” as programming, they still had a very personal tone. Now it seems as though most blogs I read already have all the answers worked out before they even write the post. It’s more about building up your readership or appearing as an authority on some topic. Admittedly all this is very much my personal perception and dependent on the particular blogs that I’ve frequented over the years.

Maybe what I’m really getting at is the general commercialization of blogging. Obviously a lot of “blogs” aren’t really personal web logs anymore, but media machines for generating readership and ad dollars. Even a lot of “personal” blogging advice seems to be more geared towards creating a nice neat package for your readers. And there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. We certainly need well thought out writing and everyone I think should strive to communicate their ideas well, regardless if it’s programming or cooking or talking about your kids.

I guess what’s missing to me is the “story”. We have more bloggers writing posts that read like cold tutorials or instruction manuals. This seems especially true in the programming circles. Everybody has their pet language or framework or technique or opinion that they’re pushing for Google juice.

Maybe I’m just bitter. Maybe what I’m feeling is actually more personal. Admittedly I’ve had a hard time figuring out what I want this blog to be about. I oscialate between some kind of programming blog and some kind of personal “I ate pizza for dinner” blog. Of course, all of this really seems kinda pointless when I consider I have 0 readership :)

The title of this post comes from a Sufjan Stevens song I was listening to on the train this morning. The line has always stuck in my head, but I’ve never been quite sure what it means. I guess there’s the obvious interpretation… and maybe that’s really what I’ve been missing and what I’m getting at… the obvious. Blogging is interesting because it’s people and it’s stories and it’s struggle and revelation. It’s the combination of all these things, and to take away the struggle is to take away the tension. It’s like giving away the ending at the beginning of the story.

Gary Vaynerchuk has this great video about “having both jobs”. In a nutshell, having both jobs means you can work the day job AND still pursue your passion or dream job in the evening. Of course, it takes hard work and sacrifice, which is what nobody wants to hear but is the simple, indisputable truth of building anything.

I came across this article this morning via Hacker News. In a nutshell, the authors are using a custom framework for their new site consisting of empty, static HTML templates which are then populated with data on the client side using JavaScript to fetch JSON from the server.

This is a really cool idea, not without caveats and problems that still need to be solved, but I like the core idea. Now that we’re all Web 2.0 with dynamic page updates via AJAX/JavaScript, managing the initial page render of template plus data on the server side PLUS handling the JavaScript/JSON requests requires careful planning and architecture to keep everything DRY and maintainable. Even with some of the best constructs out there (I favor “respond_to” from Rails, but I’m sure there are others), it still just feels dirty to me.

Of course the biggest question is what if the client doesn’t have JavaScript enabled, which most notably includes search engine crawlers. And I don’t have an answer for that, but as we continue to move forward and see JavaScript performance improve and become such an integral part of the modern browser I wouldn’t be surprised if this problem doesn’t solve itself. It seems to be one of the fundamental questions facing the future of the web, how do move forward on a platform that was initially designed to be document centric but which has given growth to dynamic applications? We have a lot of incremental solutions, and I think we’ll continue to see these, but at some point will we get an evolutionary step forward?

I can feel this post quickly tumbling down the rabbit hole, so I’ll stop there…