The Refined Geek

Its almost trite to talk about Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers these days as it seems everyone is familiar with the key concept of mastery requiring a certain level of practice, on the order of 10,000 hours. Indeed the idea even spurred people on to do their own experiments to see how true the rule rang to life and the results of said experiments shows that there’s something to it, even if the hours required may vary wildly from person to person. I have unwittingly been participating in my own versions of these experiments for the past few years and a new milestone came up yesterday that I had completely forgot about.

I hit post 1000.

It seems like a lifetime ago when I hit that milestone that every blogger seems to celebrate publicly: the 100th post. Reading it again it’s clear to see how far I’ve come as the post is littered with smilies (which look horrendous to me now), the tone is completely different and it’s clear that I’m writing it directly to the only people I know are reading, I.E. my friends. Whilst I can’t claim that I’m some kind of blogging superstar now I do know my reach extends much further now than it did back then with my daily readership exceeding that of my monthly numbers back then. Back then however it felt like I had made some real substantial progress in my quest to become a blogger but upon reflection of my 1000th post it feels like I’m just starting out all over again.

Most of my posts don’t take that long to write, comparatively speaking, with most of them going from concept to draft to published piece in the space of 1~2 hours with more than a few being way above that. Putting that in perspective I’m probably about 2000 hours into the requisite 10,000 to obtaining mastery which, at my current rate, puts me at mastery some time in the mid 2020s. There are ways of accelerating this of course (I’d say that my experience writing for LifeHacker probably counts for 2x~3x the hours I spent on it due to the amount I learned whilst working for them) and I jump at the chance whenever they come my way but it’s still daunting to think that I’ve invested almost 5 years at this point and I’m only 20% into my journey.

Does that make me want to stop? Hell no! The opportunities that have opened up to me as a result of my work-daily rantings have been some of the most exciting things I’ve ever done and the more I blog the more those things seem to keep on happening to me. Whilst I’ve never attained the kind of overnight success that I had envisioned coming my way one day the slow and steady build up just never seems to stop. It can be disheartening some times when you write something you believe is brilliant and inspired only to have it fall on its face but, as the past has shown, I’m a terrible judge of what will be popular and for that I blame those little multiplying haters in my head.

It’s comforting to know that people I respect highly struggle with the same things I do, even if our medium of choice is different. I’ve always had this disembodied version of myself hanging over my shoulder, constantly critiquing everything that I’m doing. In all honesty it’s a great thing and it’s responsible for a large part of why I’ve enjoyed so much success in other aspects of my life but it can be a real detriment, especially when it collides with my almost OCD level compulsions. It hasn’t gotten any easier as the years have gone by but I’ve developed a whole bunch more tools in order to deal with it. That’s probably the biggest insight I’ve had into this whole 10,000 hour thing as it’s more about understanding and overcoming your shortcomings more than anything else.

Unlike my myriad of other hobbies I feel that blogging is one that will stick around for good, just like gaming and software development did before them. It’s something that I’ve made a heck of a lot of progress in and the idea of giving it up just doesn’t seem to make sense like it did back when my daily viewer count was in the single digits. Whether or not it’ll morph into more or less than what it currently is however remains to be seen but I’m sure as I keep chipping away at that 10,000 hour goal more good things will come of it. I might not ever become the blogging starlet that I thought I was going to be all those years ago but I’ll be damned if it hasn’t been a blast regardless.

It was a long time ago now, getting near to 3 years, when I made the decision to start publishing something on a week-daily basis to this blog. I can’t really say what drove me to do that, it certainly wasn’t because I was rolling in page views and I had an audience hungry for more content¹. For the first couple months the writing came easy since I was just mostly posting my opinion on one thing or another but you can only keep posting opinions about things for so long before you feel you’ve said all you need to say on those soft issues, at least when you’re trying to write to a deadline.

I’m not the only one suffering from this either, it seems:

Whilst I didn’t make the connection between my off days when I post inane crap because I can’t find anything better to write about (although I have been told that those off days are some of my best writing, go figure) and the mainstream media I can definitely understand it now. I had just always assumed that people getting paid to do this had a much better process of finding something to write about rather than my haphazard daily troll of other blogs, YouTube clips and news aggregation sites hoping that an article triggers that writing spark in the back of my head.

The restriction of daily posting, or it seems any deadline, is definitely what leads me to post what I feel is lesser quality work. In the beginning the wanting to write was what drove me but after a couple months of near daily posts it morphed from a routine into a habit, one that I’ve had a terrible time at breaking. It also doesn’t help that Google seems to punish me if I stray from my posting schedule, further reinforcing the behavior. I could probably circumvent the Google punishment if I tried hard enough (by writing with SEO in mind more) but I feel that’d erode the intentions of my blog further than me posting some crud every so often.

Funnily enough it seems that the solution to my problem may be found in adding more restrictions rather than lifting my current one. My goal of doing 1 game review per week for the entire year (I’ve only missed 1 week so far and have every intention to catch that up) has been an amazing experience, seeing me play all sorts of games that I wouldn’t have given a second thought to otherwise. It also means that I spend one less day a week wondering what the hell I’m going to write about in the morning, even if the time investment to getting that post there is orders of magnitude above anything else I’ve written.

It’s always nice to know that you’re not alone in your suffering, even if it doesn’t help you overcome that immediate problem. I all too often think that the problems I experience are because I was never really good at this writing thing in the first place only to find out later that no, all writers struggle with the same problems. At least then I can share in their misery and maybe even help out a little if I get the chance to, although it seems we’re much more likely to suffer in silence than to say anything about it.

Well, unless it makes for good blog fodder that is

¹Indeed for the first couple months of its life I was happy that this blog would have a day that didn’t have 0 views. I’ve also been told in no uncertain terms that my initial attempt at being a blogger was crap, but usually in the same breath as saying that I’ve vastly improved since then (which I always appreciate hearing).

I’m under no delusions that I’m some kind of highfalutin blogger who’s under constant bombardment by corporate suitors looking to peddle their wares through my site. I have however been privy to some things that I wouldn’t have had a chance at otherwise had I not kept on writing for all these years so I’m somewhat familiar with the usual process of how an initial email will turn into something concrete. However it appears that there’s a lot of people out there, some of them possibly genuine, who have no idea how to contact even low end bloggers like myself in order to get some coverage. Today I’m going to lay my cards on the table and detail the response you’ll get should you ignore them.

Firstly I have a public email address that I published on this site with the primary intention of giving people an easy access avenue to me should they want to chat, comment or approach me for some kind of business related venture. It was also something of an experiment to see just how much spam I’d get through it and for the record it’s basically none (current queue is 71, all handled well by Gmail). You can feel free to email me at that address with whatever it is you want to talk to me about and I’m pretty much guaranteed to respond to it within 24 hours. If you don’t get a response it’s likely you’ve violated one of my cardinal rules, ones that if broken I’ll at best ignore you and at worst make sure I waste as much of your time as possible.

For starters you need to address me in the email, not Admin or webmaster or TheRefinedGeek or whatever your spam program uses, just me. That’s my initial sniff test to filter for carpet bomb emails but I’ve also simply deleted other emails which were possibly genuine just based on the fact that they couldn’t take the 2 extra seconds to find the About page and find my actual name. To date everyone I’ve had a successful blogging relationship with has managed to find my name without issue so if you can do the same you’re guaranteed to not get thrown into the trash along with all the other spammers.

Most importantly, and pay attention here because violating this rule will get you on the “waste this sucker’s time” list, you have to actually understand what this blog is and how you might fit into its overall picture. It seems that after I put the magical words “guest post” into my long time friend’s Call of Duty review people think it’s open slather for writing something on here. I’m am most certainly open to people writing guest posts on here but I’ve turned every single unsolicited one down so far simply because they want to write something that’s just not what this blog is about, nor I think my current audience would find particularly interesting. What this says to me is that you’ve done some kind of Google search for blogs that have posts with a title containing the words “Guest Post” and then emailed them hoping you could peddle your wares to. Just read 2 weeks worth of posts here and you’ll figure out if the article you have in mind is a good fit for here and then ask yourself why you want it here and not on your own personal blog.

These rules aren’t particularly rigorous so if you’re a real person looking to make a connection or a blogger looking for a place to show your writing to a wider audience you’ll have no problem complying with them. The spammers and idiots however will continue to trip them up, usually failing at the first “say my name, bitch” step. I might not be a bigshot blogger but I have standards and respect for the work I do and if my standards are too high for you then I’m sure you can find a home among all the other spammy blogs that will welcome you with open arms.

Sometimes it’s the simple things that can really make your day. Logging into my admin panel this morning I was greeted with this little gem.

That peak there? My busiest day I’ve ever had on this blog and it wasn’t because of some big site linking to me. That’s what keeps me going, moments like that where I realise that it’s really possible for me to build something that people like to read. Whilst I love it when I do get linked to by big sites it’s always more satisfying when I hit milestones like that off my own back.

I can’t wait to do it again

This blog can really be the bane of my existence sometimes. Whilst most days I’m able to rifle through a couple hundred articles in my RSS feeds and find a topic that I can blurt out a few hundred words over. However if I fail at that initial endeavour I find myself in the rather undesirable situation of not having anything that good to write about. Now this never used to be a problem I’d simply close the new post page and go about the rest of my day like nothing happened. A couple months after I decided to start blogging regularly however I found myself not being able to close the browser and move on, something was compelling me to blog.

I realised that I had just given myself OCD.

I can’t wholly blame the regular blogging dedication for my condition however as I think it’s due to a couple factors. You see I’m rather keen on hard numbers and the stats I run on this blog showed me that on the days that I don’t blog at least half of the people that usually come here simply don’t. Since the major source of visitors here are from Google I figure that’s because they kick me down a notch on off days in favour of more active content sources and it’s held true for the past couple years. Add that kind of aversion therapy to a regular habit and you’re onto a winner for developing an OCD without thinking about it. At least that’s been my experience anyway.

Interestingly though I’ve found these kind of writer’s block days that I get from time to time strongly correlate to those days that I haven’t got enough sleep. Today’s block then comes courtesy of the server that hosts this blog being a right ass again, slowing everything down to a crawl. Thus last night I was up late updating all my other blog’s WordPress installations and adding caching to them in the hopes that it’d become responsive again. It seems to have made it better but I’m still slamming the hell out of the 2 CPUs on this box, something which WordPress is notorious for doing. I’ll probably lose a few more hours on that tonight again as I try to optimize the database, which is just as fun as it sounds.

I was going to write a witty end to this, but I’ve run out of steam on this meta-rant

Way back when I used to host this server myself on the end of my tenuous ADSL connection loading up the web site always felt like something of a gamble. There were any number of things that could stop me (and the wider world) from getting to it like: the connection going down, my server box overheating or even the power going out at my house (which happened more often than I realised). About a year ago I made the move onto my virtual private server and instantly all those worries evaporated and the blog has been mostly stable ever since. I no longer have to hold my breath every time I type my url into the address bar nor do I worry about posting media rich articles anymore, something I avoided when my upstream was a mere 100KB/s.

What really impressed me though was the almost instant traffic boost that I got from the move. At the time I just put it down to more people reading my writing as I had been at it for well over a year and a half at that point. At the same time I had also made a slight blunder with my DNS settings which redirected all traffic from my subdomains to the main site so I figured that the burst in traffic was temporary and would drop off as people’s DNS caches expired. The strangest thing was though that the traffic never went away and continued to grow steadily. Not wanting to question my new found popularity I just kept doing what I was always doing until I stumbled across something that showed me what was happening.

April last year saw Google mix in a new metric to their ranking algorithm: page load speed, right around the same time that I experienced the traffic boost from moving off my crappy self hosting and onto the VPS. The move had made a significant improvement in the usability of the site, mostly due to the giant pipe that it has, and it appeared that Google was now picking up on that and sending more people my way. However the percentage of traffic coming here from search engines remained the same but since it was growing I didn’t care to investigate much further.

I started to notice some curious trends though when aggregating data from a couple different sources. I use 2 different kinds of analytics here on The Refined Geek the first being WordPress.com Stats (just because it’s real-time) and Google Analytics for long term tracking and pretty graphs. Now both of them agree with each other pretty well however the one thing they can’t track is how many people come to my site but leave before the page is fully loaded. In fact I don’t think there’s any particular service that can do this (I would love to be corrected on this) but if you’re using Google’s Webmaster Tools you can get a rough idea of the number of people that come from their search engine but get fed up waiting for your site to load. You can do this by checking the number of clicks you get from search queries and comparing that to the number of people visiting your site from Google Analytics. This will give you a good impression of how many people abandon your site because it’s running too slow.

For this site the results are quite surprising. On average I lose about 20% of my visitors between them clicking on the link in Google and actually loading a page¹. I shudder to think how many I was losing back in the days where a page would take 10+ seconds to load but I’d hazard a guess it was roughly double that if I take into account the traffic boost I got after moving to a dedicated provider. Getting your site running fast then is probably one of the most important things you can do if you’re looking to get anywhere on the Internets, at least that’s what my data is telling me.

After I realised this I’ve been on a bit of a performance binge, trying anything and everything to get it running better. I’m still in the process of doing so however and many of the tricks that people talk about for WordPress don’t translate well into the Windows world so I’m basically hacking my way through it. I’ve dedicated part of my weekend to this and I’ll hopefully write up the results next week so that you other crazy Windows based WordPressers can benefit from my tinkering.

¹If people are interested in finding out this kind of data from their Google Analytics/Webmasters Tools account let me know and I might run up a script to do the comparison for you.

This blog has had a variety of homes over the past few years although you wouldn’t know it by looking at it. Initially it was hosted on a Windows 2008 server I built myself, sitting behind the tenuous link of my ADSL connection. Don’t get me wrong this is a great way to get started if you’ve got admin roots like me but inevitably my ADSL connection would go down or people would just plain give up waiting for it to load, what with my upstream only able to handle 100KB/s. Still for most of its life the blog remained in that configuration as I couldn’t find a hosting provider I was happy with.

Of course the day came when WordPress decided to stop playing nice with IIS and started returning internal server 500 errors. Thankfully it would usually right itself after a reboot but it was always a count down to the time when it would start erroring out again and being the busy man that I am I never had the time to troubleshoot it. Eventually I caved and set up an Ubuntu box to host it, figuring that all my woes would be solved by switching to the platform that everyone expects WordPress to run on. I’ll be honest it was a good change as I could finally use all the caching plugins, and traffic took an upward trend thanks to the faster loading times.

Unfortunately that didn’t last particularly long either as whilst the blog was particularly zippy the Linux VM would sometimes stop responding to requests and would only start behaving itself after a reboot. The cause of this I’m still not sure of as the VM was still up but it just refused to keep on serving web pages, including all the funky admin tools my PHPMyAdmin and Webmin. It was around this time I found myself in possession of a shiny new VPS that was only hosting my fledgling app Lobaco so I figured a small time WordPress blog wouldn’t be too much for it to handle. Indeed it wasn’t and the blog has been steaming along on it ever since.

However the unfortunate internal server errors returned eventually and whilst I was able to get around them with the trusty old reboot a couple times they became more persistent until I eventually couldn’t get rid of them. After digging around in the event logs for a while I eventually stumbled across references to php_wincache.dll which upon googling lead me to posts like these, showing I wasn’t alone in this internal server error hell. Disabling the plugin fixed the problem and all was well with the world. Of course many months later I found myself  trying to optimize my blog again and I started looking at the things I had removed in order to keep this thing up and running.

The first was the caching plug-ins which are unequivocally the best thing for performance on a dynamic PHP site. The vast majority of WordPress caching plug-ins don’t play nice with Windows as they make the assumption they’re on Linux and attempt to write files in all sorts of whacky locations that simply don’t exist. WP-SuperCache, although still suffering from some Linux based assumptions, can be wrangled into working properly with IIS and has been doing so for the past couple months. I also found that WinCache had been updated since I had unceremoniously removed it from my php.ini file so I decided to give it another try. Again everything was rosy for a time, that was until last weekend.

I fired up my blog on Saturday to find the home page coming up fine but I was logged out for some reason. This happens from time to time so I wasn’t worried but trying to login left me with the dreaded internal server 500 error. Poking around it looked like any non-cached page was failing meaning the majority of my site was unavailable. The event logs showed the dreaded WinCache dll failing again and disabling it brought my website back around again. It seems, at least for now, that I’ll have to give WinCache a miss as the last update to it was almost 3 months ago and its past performance has led me to believe that it’s not entirely stable.

So if you’re crazy like me, trying to run WordPress on IIS and all, and you’re WordPress blog seems to take a dive more often than not make sure to get rid of WinCache at least until they get their act together. I haven’t delved into my previous VMs to see if it was the culprit back then but my most recent set of problems can be traced directly back to WinCache wrecking havoc by attempting to cache PHP objects and if this post can save 1 person the headache of trying to track it down I’ll consider it a huge success. 

It seems that no matter how long I keep doing this whole blogging thing I’m still unable to judge which of my posts will end up being popular, controversial or just simply fall flat on their face. The most popular post on my site (excluding the home page) for some bizzare reason appears to be my April fools post from a couple years ago that seems to draw in several hundred people a month simply for the fact that it has 2 pictures of ponies in it. The second is the only piece that was ever linked to by a reputable news organisation, my original post on BitCoins. Even then though the post wasn’t popular until a month after I had written it, an eternity here on the Internet.

What confuses me most is though is that the posts that I considered forced, rushed pieces of work (usually ones I write when I can’t find anything good to write about) usually end up being some of the most commented and thought provoking pieces. It could be that I’m just somewhat self defeatist in this regard, thinking that if I can’t hit that creative spark in under an hour then obviously anything I’m plonking down is going to be crap. Still though those particular posts are usually the ones where I’ve spent the least amount of effort researching, proof reading and polishing which would make you think that they’d be below average.

Normally I’d just write that off as confirmation bias, since there have been many posts from both sides of the equation that have had varying levels of success. The perceived failure of a well researched post sticks much more clearly in my mind however, because I feel like there’s been so much more effort put into it. A great example of this was last week’s post on eSports which was a massive undertaking for me, taking up a good 4 hours to research, analyse and write. Of course it could end up being a surprising success story a month down the line but for a post that managed to generate such energetic conversation amongst my peers I had thought that it would hit a chord with enough people for it to see a bit more light than it did. I might’ve missed the boat on that one though, as I ofte do with my strict “one post per day at the regularly scheduled time” routine.

Realistically though I don’t dwell too much on whether a post will be popular or not. My giant backlog of 600+ posts seems to attract a variety of people looking for posts on varying topics and there’s a good collection of posts that bring people back consistently. I am getting better at recognizing which posts will do better in the longer term but it still seems to be a guessing game for the most part. It might be a different game for bloggers who have a larger audience as right now my sample size is probably too small to draw any proper conclusions from, but until such time as I reach those dizzying heights of blogging stardom I’ll have to make do with working in the uncertainty of what the wider world would like to see from me.

I was never a big fan of writing. I’m a very stereotypical nerd/engineer in that respect as I always struggled to get my thoughts down on paper, especially when I was told I wasn’t elaborating enough. I became frustrated with the arbitrary word counts as everything I needed to say could be summed up in a couple paragraphs and struggled with gathering supporting arguments. It got easier when I started writing documentation professionally, since all you really need there are the facts, but I only really started to enjoy writing about 6 months after I started this blog when I started to force myself to punch out at least 1 post per weekday.

I’ll be honest with you though, I still struggled with the basics for quite a while. Back then inspiration was a lot easier to come across than it was today (thanks to me not having a massive back catalogue of stuff I’ve already written about) but writing anything more than 500 words was a complete chore as the engineer in me yelled continually that anything more was just me waffling on. Over time however I came to realise just how to trigger that part of my brain that knows how to break down a subject into several key points that I can then turn into a paragraph each and now I routinely find myself writing 1000~2000 word posts on things that I’m passionate about.

Of course the small bit of recognition I get amongst my friends and peers for my various musings here go a long way to keeping me coming back to continue writing. It’s why whenever I hear about a friend starting up a blog I’ll link to them, subscribe to their blog and comment on their posts as I know how hard it is when you’re first starting out. I was shouting into the darkness for a good year before I got anything above what I’d classify Internet background noise so I know exactly what it can feel like to do something with seemingly no return. Of course most of the benefits don’t come from page views, but they certainly help to keep you on track to improving your writing (and hopefully other aspects of your life too).

Now I don’t necessarily recommend doing what I do exactly as whilst it’s been immensely helpful for me it’s also had the rather undesirable side effect of giving me a crazy OCD for getting a post out every day. Whilst some of my most complimented bits of writing come from the days when I have to drag inspiration kicking and screaming out of the dark reaches of my brain it would probably be a whole lot better, at least creatively, if I only wrote when the inspiration hit me. Indeed some of the best blogs I read come from those who only write when they really have to. That’s not to say that all my posts are forced out (the majority, thankfully, aren’t) but unless your goal is SEO and page views blogging or writing whenever suits you is probably the best option.

I’d also go out on a limb and say that any sort of online creative expression (whether blogging, vlogging, tweeting or whatever) will help you better yourself in some way. Of course I think some mediums are better for certain things (blogging is best for writing, of course) but giving yourself some sort of creative outlet, even if you think you aren’t that good, will do wonders for you. Sure many people already have these, especially those who make a living off their creativity, but having your own place of expression where only you are in control is definitely something worth having.

I’m not going to say that everyone in the world should blog, more that if you’re looking for a sure fire way to improve your writing and being able focus your thoughts then starting a blog might be the way to go. Plus there’s always the possibility that what you jot down will gain you an audience that will keep coming back for your musings, something that’s extremely gratifying (even the trolls, to a point). Hell if you’re worried about what people might think then just open up notepad every time you want to write something down and save the files off in some random location. Even doing that I think you’d be surprised of the improvements after a while, I know I certainly have.

A long time ago I made a decision to do at least one post per day on weekdays. I’m not sure where I pulled that figure from, probably because it lined up nicely with the fact I had absolutely nothing to do at the time whilst at work, but after about 6 months habit took over and I was then compelled to write at least once a day. The only sure fire way I’ve found to break myself out of this loop is to be on holiday somewhere, although should that holiday go over a weekday I’ll still have that niggling little voice in the back of my head telling me I should post something. In fact I’d say that it’s obsessive compulsive disorder that drives a good chunk of posts on here, it’s now such a part of my morning ritual that not getting one out can seriously impact my productivity.

My general process for finding something to write about is pretty fixed. Most of the time I simply troll my feed reader looking for something good to write about, usually something that I can either find a core theme to expand upon or a topic in which I believe I’ve got some interesting background information. Having a rather large backlog of posts means I’ve probably hit on a topic before and apart from topics where I’ve changed my position on something (like say cloud computing) there’s no good reason to go back and revisit it. Often this process ends up with me rifling through thousands of post titles, hoping to hit on that one that triggers the writer in me to plonk down a good 600+ words.

I also have a sizable backlog of drafts and post ideas that I’d love to do but simply don’t have the time or haven’t done the preparation for. Many of these are long form works that would require a whole day just to research and formulate properly. That’s not to say these will never get written indeed many of them do, but they sometimes feel to be more harmful than helpful to the whole writing process since I’ll often procrastinate trying to find something to write about by digging through them in the hopes they’ll trigger another idea (which they do not, 99% of the time).

Inspiration then is a tricky thing, as whilst it appears to strike me in some form most days it’s often preceded by hours of trawling, researching and screaming inside my head. To be honest I attribute this to trying to shit when I don’t have to go as really I shouldn’t try to force myself to write when I don’t have anything good to say. I’d probably do that too if the posts I write on those days weren’t the ones that get me positive comments (how that works I’ll never know) and it seems that if I go more than my usual 2 day break on the weekend Google likes to punish me by dropping me down a couple notches, thereby reinforcing my OCD habit of needing to do it every weekday.

Still for all my whinging about the difficulty in finding inspiration for things to post on here I still very much enjoy the whole process once I get it rolling. There are also a whole bunch of posts that come along quite easily (like my reviews) and it seems that no matter how stuck I get eventually something will eventually trigger in my head that will lead me to posting something here. Like any endeavor its not always rainbows and flowers but the rewards I’ve reaped from blogging (both real and intangible) far outweigh the costs of doing so, and I know that the work I do is appreciated.

At least some of the time anyway