It’s been a long time since I’ve added anything to my blog — almost three years, now that I look back at my last post. I’ve been meaning to add more entries to my blog, but I just haven’t gotten around to it. I think the main problem is because I really don’t know what the focus of my blog is, or what I want to blog about. So, to help me get over this hurdle, I decided to sign up for WordPress’ Blogging 101 course.
The first assignment in this course is to “Introduce Yourself to the World”. The intention is to blog about who we are and why we’re here. Maybe if I do this, it will help me to gain a little clarity on why I’m keeping a blog.
Well, here goes…
My name is Shane McDonald. I live in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. I work as an instructor at Saskatchewan Polytechnic, in the Computer Systems Technology program. I mostly teach computer programming courses, with a smattering of Word / Excel / PowerPoint / etc. introductory classes thrown in the mix. Tomorrow is the first day of a new semester; I’ll be teaching a class in Java, and a class in C.
Why am I blogging? Well, thinking back to when I started this blog, I had a number of reasons:
- I wanted to get some experience with WordPress.
- I wanted to practice writing, in order to help to express my thoughts more clearly.
- I wanted a place to record solutions to computer problems that I’ve run across, and I thought other people might also run across. I know a quick Google search often helps me to find the solution to problems, but if nobody had bothered to record their solution, it wouldn’t help me out very much.
Thinking about it now, I think that third reason is probably the reason that seems most important to me. I know I get a good feeling when I see people accessing my posts, and I hope that others are able to solve the same problems I had, but without a lot of searching! My top post seems to be this one about how to use numbers in formulas in Microsoft Word mail merges; my least popular posts seem to be my series of tips on using the Vi text editor, which was an outgrowth of a set of tips that I had created on a corporate Wiki at a previous employer.
My problem seems to be that I either don’t run across too many problems (yeah, I wish), or that I don’t bother to take the time to record my solutions for posterity (more likely!).
Anyways, by taking this blogging course, I’m hoping to gain a little more focus on my blog, and to get some motivation to write posts. Who knows, I might even completely change the focus of my blog! If nothing else, at least I’ve created this one post, and people will see that I still exist! I’m excited to work through this course and see how things come along!!!