Hello again! Let’s talk about blogging - in particular, say, I don’t know, my blogging :)

Blogging is cool. It’s also not that hard. You don’t have to write a long essay - it shouldn’t be tweet-sized either, but it doesn’t need to be too long. Take a little while to share something, even if it’s just a piece of your mind.

I particularly like focused blogs that solve some kind of problem most. I’ve been the jolly recipient of someone else’s effort in documenting how they fixed something many times before, and each time I bless that blogger’s soul. The variety and quantity of VMware blogs is really something to be proud of as a member of this vCommunity.

There’s some really great blogs that focus on original content, and those for me are just the best (http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/ for example), and there’s also lots of blogs that explain how to accomplish something, tutorial style (https://www.jorgedelacruz.es is probably the best one out there, notice though it’s in Spanish). If you want to start blogging, my advice is that you don’t need to compete with them. I will tell you that you have to be yourself and write about things that you enjoy. All of us sharing is what this is all about.

I have blogged on IT, but mostly VMware, topics for a while. With that idea -focused blogs, to the point, hopefully teach something in an easier manner than what it took me to learn it- I’ve actually created a problem for myself. I have… too many blogs, which are so focused on particular topics, that each one of them reads like someone wrote some posts and then left it there for months. I haven’t been able to give proper maintenance to them - and for each I have ideas and I do want to keep blogging on them.

The only reason that I don’t blog more is time. I’m always asking myself what is the best use of my time. And very frequently, that isn’t blogging. Which is sad, because one of my rules is that I don’t blog about something if I find that somebody already did a great blog post about it. By great, I mean:

So if I have a blog idea, in my heart I really believe it adds to the community; meaning, it’s different, clear and provides value.

You have probably detected in my tone that I’m not happy with my blogging situation in general. My friend Azarya, who I think is the only person who has tried to keep up and read several of my blogs, also complained to me about this situation. “It’s such a pain in the butt to follow you around!”. Bless your heart Azarya, you are a true nice person and friend. He made me realize that my idea of individual, focused blogs was probably not the best.

I admit, I knew it. Some others things were already painful. vExperts get free blog promotion through the program, but which one to send? I didn’t have one RSS feed, I had several. If somebody asked me what my blog was, which one was it? None of them was particularly well-known, even if the collection of them was not trivial. I would spend time on one setting up the Google Analytics/Adsense/RSS etc, and the next one had none of that. I floated the line around with friends and in VMworld “Nobody knows what my blog is”. Not one person corrected me. Then again, I only post arielsanchezmora.com in my twitter profile, but it was clearly inconsistent all over and not a good thing.

Now, tricky questions arise when trying to consolidate. Do I import my old content into a new blog? Some of this stuff is old and no longer relevant, plus, time intensive. Do I make some HTML magic so it shows all my blogs as panes? That gets ugly real quick. No, it’s probably better to start with a new platform, try to make it the main one, and if I do want to post something in one of the other blogs, then I’ll just make a little post linking to it. That solves all of my current problems and is the least work intensive, so that’s what I’ll do, and re-evaluate how it goes with the benefit of hindsight.

And thus the idea of blogs.arielsanchezmora.com was born! This is now my official blog, which was impossible to say before. I hope you get some value of the posts that will appear here.

Now, another thing with me, is I’m always trying to learn something new, and I really only learn if I’m forcing myself to learn. So this new blog is being hosted on Github Pages -I am not proficient in Github at all-, and I’m writing it in MarkDown -I suck at it-, and also doing all the editing in my PC and then sync’ing with Github commands -guess what I also suck at-. As you can probably tell, I haven’t been able to figure out parentheses yet…

So, from now on, anytime I post to

Or do blog contributions in

Or I attend a podcast, recording, etc, I will make a small post linking to it here. I’ll also post general stuff in this blog, and keep my arielsanchezmora.com google site updated.

While this sounds complicated, I find that it’s 1) free 2) fast 3) functional. So, I’m sticking to this idea for now.

Let me know your comments in Twitter @arielsanchezmor. Thank you for reading, and hope to see you around soon!

Ariel