I referred to my frustration in my post yesterday about "not really getting to post what you really want to." That is, to some extent, the catch of blogging in general, that there is a lot you can't say in "professional" blogs. I am an expressive person by nature. The second aspect is being on codebetter.com. I feel that CodeBetter is one of the best and most consistent sites in the development community and that we have made a huge difference in bring a whole aspect of Continuous Design and other state of the art development practices. I like to think we are helping to change the .NET community one post at a time from the drag & drop RAD mess to the disciplined TDD/Design Patterns/DI/Agile/Architecture world that we would like the .NET community to become; that there is another way besides just running Visual Studio; that investing in your craft and job makes a world of difference.

With all that comes a great pressure on what I can blog. Now don't get me wrong: NO ONE at CB has ever said what I can or can not post. I have been given 100% freedom. I just feel an internal pressure to maintain extraordinarily high standards. Moreover, every once in a while, if I slip in something not mind blowing latest Agile post but personal or whatever, I might get some reader (rarely) saying "what is this shit?" My feelings really get hurt as I have blogged consistently relevant .NET content over 5 years in this community, something that only Simon Fell can also claim (Peter Drayton doesn't blog anymore). But it also produces a bit of anger in me as I stated from day one here, that I was going to blog what I want, whenever I want and that no one is paying me for doing this. I spend hours on each N&N post for instance. Thus there is no right for people to have expectations that they are entitled to something. If someone doesn't like a blog, get your own.  It's also as easy to unsubscribe.

That being said, I have thousands of loyal readers and there is huge degree of satisfaction versus a tiny number that have behaved like what I just described. My desire to say so much more is huge though. I really envy my good pal Harry Pierson that does this in his regular Morning Coffee posts, he's integrated it right in. I feel that doing that on CB would drive some readers nuts. I also want to write about politics, music, my family, heck life in general. So to that end, I have started a personal, family, blog. Feel free to subscribe if you're interested in that shit. This blog, will remain true to my high standards for relevant content.

Thanks for listening. I think I have opened several blogging issues here. What do you feel? How do you approach these issues?

Update: As you may notice, it no longer says Mac blog, For reasons listed here, I have gone back to my existing WordPress blog as my personal blog. Sorry for all the churn! 

I'm rocking out to Maggot Brain (Live) by Funkadelic from the album Under A Groove