finding my voice

August 04, 2007

Almost four years ago, I started writing a series about why I keep a weblog. One key reason on my list is that this weblog has helped me find my voice. When I started blogging, I thought my blog would be full of technical tips and practical insights from my love of coding. As it turns out, I had a lot of other things to say.

A few weeks ago, I spent an afternoon sifting thru my postings to create category-based archives (now available at the top-right of the homepage). As regular readers of my blog and I have discovered, this weblog is about software interface design and development, with occasional posts influenced by my identity as a woman in male-dominated field and a number of posts about my work at Laszlo with RIAs (aka AJAX applications). Visualization, language and learning are directly related to interface design, from my perspective, and they show my particular influences.

The delightful thing about a weblog is that we can define our own rules that determine what is or is not appropriate. For me, every post need not fit into an overall theme, the themes emerge. I found a number of posts that I felt worth archiving that didn’t fit into a category:

* dinosaurs and memory
* What’s that bug?
* work as play
* stage fright
* MLK’s American Dream
* art walking on the beach

Maybe in a year or two, I’ll have some more categories… or perhaps even more hard to categorize posts.