I’m building up a collection of half finished posts for this site and not actually finishing any. I’m not sure why I do this.. perhaps it’s because I’m not sure that I want to air that particular dirty laundry or because it’s not “polished” enough or maybe I’m just scared or something. So I’ve come up with a plan…

My plan is this, I will attempt to write at least one post every day for the next few months. If I skip a day for what ever reason I must make it up before the end of that week. For simplicity and to ensure that I have adequate time to catch up, I’ll make the week start on the Monday that way I have the weekend to catch up on all the posting.

The rules that I’m setting for my self are as follows:

• Each post must be more than 300 words and cannot be just a collection of pictures or links to various sites.
• All posts have to be largely my own work, I may “borrow” an idea from someone else but I’ve got to actually write the entire post my self (no copy & pasting).
• The posts should be on as wide a range of subjects as possible no writing just about the stuff.za.net or programming or computers, I have to include things like the weather, my childhood or something like that.

So why am I doing this? Well I want to improve my writing and according to a website I was reading (and can’t find the link for right now.) the only way to actually improve it is to practice it and actually write stuff, the other reason is that I want to see if I can drive more visitors to this site mainly to further inflate my rather large ego.

As far as I can tell there are four ways to drive more people to this site:

1. Spam everyone with the address of this site.. post it on Digg and Slashdot and anywhere else I can think of and maybe just maybe a few people will click on the link because they new too this whole Internet thing.
2. Write lots of “me too” posts that basically link to other blogs and then add my 2c worth. Extra points awarded if it’s a link to a post that is link to a post that is a link to post… that is a link to a post about blogging and all I say is “You should go read this post it’s awesome…”.
3. Write something original (it doesn’t actually have to be any good or well written) and then sit back and wait. The more things you’ve written the better chance you have that someone might stumble upon your site and stick around a while reading all the nonsense you’ve written.
4. Be famous. If you’re “famous” you don’t even have to post anything and millions of people will turn up at your site.

Obviously I’m going for method number 3… however I hope that if I do this long enough 4 might work too.

Why only 300 words? Because it’s a nice round number? And because when I got to that point in this post I had only written about 198 so I thought I would round up and then let myself have enough space to write my closing.

Why original work? Well there’s nothing I hate more than visiting a site and getting the impression that all it is is an edited version of someone else’s work. It’s also a challenge to actually come up with something original and write about it and besides copy & pasting is cheating.

Why a wide range of subjects? Well for method 3 to work (see above) I need to write about alot of different things to improve my chances of having someone stumble upon my site, it also gets very boring if I write about the same stuff over and over again… how many times can I write about adding a new plugin to wordpress or messing around with java?

So what can you do to help with my great challenge? Well you can read what I write or at least pretend to. You can link to it or tell other people about it or you can leave a comment (as long as it’s not spam.) or anything like that.

What happens if I can’t keep this up? I’m not sure yet… I am hoping that this won’t happen.