My Two-Year Anniversary of this ‘New Blog’ was last Friday.

I created this website, alanharmon.net, many years ago, primarily to have a place for people close to me to find my recipes and a few other things over the years. On July 18, 2023, I decided to start blogging For Me. It was to be a place where I could somewhat journal, brainstorm, think out loud, and provide information for me to refer back to (my own repository of information), and hopefully others would find some of this information useful as well.

As I reflect on the last two years, here is what I found that I ended up doing. I am a huge proponent of the concept that you spend time on what you enjoy doing most, so here is what I did and did not do. I created 214 posts, most of them published, with some deep writing from me (journal style), some on useful things such as how to best charge your phone, some mostly AI generated, and some that I never finished or posted. Here is a summary of the posts and my activity over last two years:

Blogging in the true sense – not that much. I don’t love writing. I write just okay, but it does not bring me joy to sit down and write down my thoughts for vary many paragraphs. I do this occasionally, but it is not something that I love to do. I am doing this today, and thought about taking my original copy and ask AI to clean it up a bit - but surprising I did not. This is me, the real me, for better or worse...

Providing Information in a Blog Format – Yes, A Lot! That is what I love doing. Consolodating information about something I know, or researching a new subject and posting what I learned about it, even though I don’t have much personal knowledge with that subject.

Coding – More than you know… I spent most of the last two years educating myself on coding websites. To do this I learned so many things, some of which I will list here. I relearned HTML, PHP, and a tiny bit of JavaScript (still way behind). I also started posting significant content to over six completely different niche websites. When I wasn’t posting on alanharmon.net, I was doing deep dives on other websites. Since I have a personality type of a “Cyclical Scanner”, this really became apparent in these periods where I would get bored with one project, and I would go headfirst back into one of my previous projects that I would improve and created more content systems to that website. I discovered SQLite from a Lex Fridman Podcast with Peter Levels. That was a real game changer for me. It really changed everything I did from that point forward with my websites. I learned how to use new tools, shifting from Coffee Cup HTML Editor to VS Code. I learned how to use the ‘new’ Visual Studio, and NuGet Packages to do many different things in helping me update my Software Controlled Content System – updating the tools and content that I used in my motion control business in the early 2000s. I learned how to use the programming language ‘R’ to get all kinds of NFL football data. I learned how to have my software access the Open AI API to get ChatGPT content for my websites. I guess it was a busy two years of focused learning on how to Code. I was a toddler Coder two years ago, maybe I am more like a teenager now. It will be a few more years before I hit 10,000 hours coding my Software Controlled Content System, but I probably will get there if God blesses me with several more years on this earth.