Sunsetting Statement

This post marks the last of the active life of this blog, which was always intended as a short-term endeavor, an experiment if you will. That said, I have learned quite a bit both in the writing and the research for the posts during this time. Part of it was being consistent about writing these posts even though a lot of times I thought about just blowing them off due to sleepiness, lack of motivation, or any number of other reasons. Second, having to think about how to best explain the function of many of the apps/services I wrote about helped me to make connections to other things, which as a side effect led me to a better understanding of what I was writing about. Arguably I was already somewhat knowledgeable about the subjects beforehand, what prompted me to write about them was what I perceived to be a lack of information as to what the common citizen could do to help protect their security/privacy online, so I made a move to fill the void.

As to the experimental nature of the blog, I was testing the effectiveness of a short-term limited-scope blog in capturing and directing my explorations of a particular subject, in this case computer security for the everyman. In that regard it was very effective, admittedly I made a list of subjects to write about from the very beginning to simplify the process later on, and this helped immensely, as not knowing what to write about was never a possible excuse. I see this as great for future short-term explorations, making a list of everything I might want to look into, then subsequently researching it, and writing about it as proof of having done the legwork.

The public nature of this experiment is another interesting facet. I found that having an imaginary audience online made me feel accountable, anyone could look at my blog and see if I'd skipped a day, of course no one would have cared enough to call me out on it as no one is exactly who read my blog. The perception that this could hypothetically happen however kept me writing. The actual audience of my blog is difficult to estimate, right now it sits at almost 300 views, but with so few it could be google spiders or other bots that are causing the numbers to increase as opposed to actual readership.

Overall I call this experiment a smashing success, its most important contribution that it opens the gate for similar short-term experimental blogs in the future, guiding and documenting research & experimentation.