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Blogger's Block #1: Joelprah
Author’s note
A little detective work pins down the "controversial technical topic" I keep promising and dodging across this series: it's Good Agile, Bad Agile, which went up ten days later. So I wasn't kidding about the controversy — and I find it historically kind of interesting that I had to write four lighthearted posts to psych myself into writing the scary one.
AI Notes
The prologue to the four-part Blogger's Block medley, and the most purely personal of the set: Steve diagnosing his own month-long case of writer's block and resolving to clear it by posting short pieces ("when in doubt, spew it out"). Along the way he accounts for the silence — a promised but unwritable "Mystery Tech Topic," a working vacation spent building a Ruby on Rails site, a server migration from RedHat 7.3 to Ubuntu, and relocating the fifty-odd old Drunken Blog Rants onto Google Pages — and slips in, almost in passing, that he now works at Google, "a teeny fish in a big ocean of brilliant people."
The title is Joelprah, a portmanteau of Joel Spolsky and Oprah Winfrey. Steve credits a couple of links from Spolsky — "the Oprah Winfrey of tech blogging" — with spiking his readership from eight or nine thousand hits a day to roughly seventy thousand, and with it the sudden need to grow a thick skin against an audience that could just as easily want to lynch him. It's the origin note for a theme that runs through Steve's writing for years, and a snapshot of the moment his blog tipped from cult favourite into something much larger.
Related listings
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2006
Blogger's Block #2: Anime for the Nonplussed
The next entry, same week — Steve acts on the 'post small stuff' resolution and files an enthusiast's report on anime instead of the promised technical topic.
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2006
Blogger's Block #3: Dreaming in Browser Swamp
Where the thick-skin theme introduced here pays off — Steve's own note on #3 looks straight back at this post's 70,000-reader deluge.
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2006
Blogger's Block #4: Ruby and Java and Stuff
The closer of the medley — the Ruby enthusiasm Steve picks up on his Rails 'vacation' here turns into a full bookshelf-watching note there.