1st Anniversary
The Integration Engineer has been on-line for a whole year now, and I feel like it is time to look back and take stock of what I set out to do here, and what happened to that vision. So today I am departing from my normal task of writing integration tips, tutorials, and experiences and am going to talk about this blog itself.
Starting out over a year ago, I started toying with the idea of going on-line and starting a blog. I saw other people doing this and read some of their stories of how they got started. I toyed with doing something on one of my hobbies, but settled on the area that I knew the most about, and that would be integration engineering. I did some additional research and picked a hosting provider and a blog platform that seemed to be the easiest to work with. I settled on wordpress as there seemed to be the most support for this and everyone seemed to be talking about it. (And I just wanted to write, not learn a new EAI)
Original Goals
When I first started this blog, I had five goals;
- Share my experiences and knowledge of integration, EDI, and Supply Chain Managment and Mapping
- Build my resume so to speak and establish my credibility on-line in my career
- Document some of the things that I had learned from others, but couldn’t find elsewhere
- learn more about blogging and writing on-line
- Maybe make some money sharing my experiences to justify the on-line hobby.
Along the Way
I started by doing some research. Then more research. Finally I just started blogging even though I knew that I didn’t know what I was doing. That was okay. I started figuring it out and making changes to the way I did things as I went along. I began thinking that I would post whenever I felt the need, and that this would be enough. I thought I would have only three topics; EDI, Mapping, and Supply Chain War Stories. And I thought that people would flock to my site to hear my words of wisdom.
And none of that has worked out. I have an EDI topic, and Mapping. But the War Stories has grown to be B2B, BPM, and SCM. I am also going to be writing more about XML and other formats along with EDI. And I started finding things on YouTube and posting them. And then I stopped doing that. I am going to do that again, as well as add some of my own videos.
I really grew to like wordpress, but I still had to learn how to tweak it to get the look and feel that I wanted. I also started playing reading bogs about blogging, and have picked up some good tips on how to make my site more user friendly.
Plans for the future.
As the second year of this blog begins, I am looking at the future and hope that I have a more developed idea of what is to come. And I have an adjusted set of goals. Five to be exact. (coincidence?)
- Finish the EDI primer series.
- Expand from just EDI to other formats like XML.
- Start working on an ebook by publishing some integration white papers here on this site for subscribers.
- Make and publish some videos to better illustrate some of the mapping concepts.
- Start a newsletter for people who subscribe to my site. (The first edition comes out this week, so be sure to subscribe if you haven’t yet.)
(Okay, so I still would like to make some money at this site too, but that is no longer one of the site goals.)
Recommendations?
As always I am looking from comments. (I guess that is yet another un-listed goal) I don’t get a lot of comments but I enjoy the ones that I do receive. If you have anything that you think would work well here, or just want to say, “Hi” then please leave me a comment.
All in all, writing this blog has been a fun project, and I am looking forward to seeing how this works out in the upcoming year.
Thanks.
Roy
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