I've had this blog since January of 2005. Every month for the past nine years and eight months, I've been pretty faithfully updating this blog by posting an entry at least once a month, but it's not the same as it used to be. In 2006, I managed to write 139 blog posts with no problem. So far, this year, I've only written nine… and we're already nine months into the year. In addition, the past few posts were written close to the end of the month. I somehow managed to be lazy for twenty-nine days of the month only to arrive at day thirty and hastily have to chalk up a blog entry in order to claim that I've kept my streak alive.

It's impressive to say that you've been blogging for the past ten years, but, for me, it's time to put an end to this blog. Essentially, I'm starting over on the blogging. Sometime within the next few days, I'll be removing all of my old posts and… starting over. For a few years, I've been toying with the idea of making a software-development blog, but I never felt that combining software-development topics here was appropriate given the topics of my other posts. If I'm starting over, I no longer have that constraint. However, I'm not sure if I really want to go towards software development as a theme. Looking at my bookshelf, I see books about not only software development but history, religion, linguistics and now homebrewing too. I think that any of these topics could be good material.

One thing that I'm sure of is that I want to write in a more professional manner. What really irritates me is that, when I go back to read old posts, I'm embarrassed about the quality. Many or most of my previous posts show little or no research effort; it's just somebody's incoherent ramblings put down on paper (metaphorically). After doing a short stint in graduate school (for the second time) and after looking at some other quality blogs carefully, I've come to appreciate the value of well-written prose. If I really need to ramble incoherently, I still have Facebook and Twitter to fall back on.

Back when I started blogging, it seemed that everyone had a blog. (Remember Xanga?) Now, it seems that fewer people still blog. Fortunately, I believe that the blogs that are still out there are better quality. If I'm choosing to continue blogging, I need to keep up with the times.

In summary, I don't know what I'll be writing about from here on out, but I can definitely say that I'll be focusing more on quality than quantity. Don't be too surprised if, ten months later, this is still the only post on the site. Fortunately, it means no more midnight writing on the last day of the month just to keep the streak alive.