Long time no post. Been very busy, just not out in the open!

A recent post on Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog inspired to dip my toe back in the water though. First was a post where he coined the word ‘Blessay‘ (though he was unaware that Stephen Fry got there first). While I don’t think I’ll be writing in the scholarly manner Dan advocates, the idea of writing longer form pieces appealed to me.

One of the reasons I wrote blog articles was to ‘give something back’. If I hit upon a solution to some interesting problem, I’d write about it. However, in the past few years StackOverflow has provided an avenue for that kind of altruism.

However, the trouble with StackOverflow is it tends to become a race to write an answer as fast as possible to garner quick upvotes. If someone posed an interesting question, I’d spend some time writing a more considered answer. While I might learn something interesting, that writing is lost among a sea of quick answers.

Until I read Dan’s post, I hadn’t realised how much I enjoyed writing longer pieces. So, I aim to do that, and get better at it!

So – the blog has a new look to focus on the text. And away we go…