Everybody was blogging. It was the new fad. Is that why I started blogging? Probably not.

I had a thing for writing since I was 14. Or at least that’s the age when I first got published in a ‘magazine for the young’ (Us). I got published multiple times after that with reviews and some funny stuff in the same magazine. But then computers and Internet happened, and I got hooked, leaving the writer in me with no option but to take a backseat. But as the Internet evolved, we saw the emergence of blogging – now anyone could write and publish themselves online, on their own web page (blog). I started blogging in 2005, on Blogger. I called it Guru’s World. I liked the Blogger platform overall. But then I wanted more control; I wanted my own domain name; and being a software engineer, I wanted to work on something more geeky … something that would help me learn programming (or something else that was related to my field) while I unleashed the writer in me. The answer lied in the open source WordPress. Upon acquiring the domain name SawantShah.com, I setup WordPress on it, called it “Zenning My Way Out” (just “Zenning” after about 2-3 years, and just recently renamed it to “Sawant Shah”), and I started blogging on this site in March 2008.

On most occasions, this blog of mine has served as a ground for experimentation rather than an actual writing space. Just looking back at the posts I have made during the course of this blog, I can see that many of them are random bits and pieces, which are not interwoven by a common theme (such as technology), but are merely my own take of things happening around (be it music, politics, technology, or anything else that caught my attention). Although it is not a bad thing to write about anything that’s happening around you (that’s the point of a blog – write about anything that interests you – isn’t it?), but I still feel that a blog needs to be coherently structured, with posts entwined around related topics and sub-topics. For example, these couple of posts of mine do not make this blog a coherent one – they are random. With the arrival of social networks, however, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest, these kind of posts can now be shared on them.

Also, since I started blogging, I have faced a common dilemma with every post that I have made: in which category should I post this?! I have made a total of 64 posts (this being 65th) in a total of 28 categories, which is less than 3 posts (2.3 to be exact) per category! That’s abominable!

Now, in order to make my blog a coherent one, I have to refactor my blog. I need to reduce the number of categories from 28 to something like 5; or I need to completely do away with categories and simply use tags only. As for the kind of posts I should be making, I am still not completely sure about that. I have a techie side to me, a creative side, a business and management side, a photographer side, a reader and writer side, a philosophical side. I think these interests can serve as a starting point for broadly categorizing most of the posts on this blog.

My experience of blogging has been great so far. And I look forward to me continuing to explore and learn about technology and all my other interests, and sharing those experiences with others here on my blog. Thus, satiating my passion for acquiring knowledge, learning and to write, all at the same time.