To do a good technical post that will get a few thousand clicks from a technical audience, you really need to do something interesting that has not been done before. Nobody is going to click on another digital alarm clock design unless I made it entirely of transistors, relays, or rat neurons, and there are only so many ‘golden’ times where you can make something interesting that everybody likes. My current project is literally a RP2350 arcade board using my last RP2350 board an old monitor and a joystick that has been in my cupboard for 15 years, and a clone of defender or oids I will probably bare metal code in C. To tell the truth, I probably wont even document it, and once its built and programmed I’ll be bored again.
My web-site went from a business calling card, to a place to put my technical posts, and now I am semi-retired (yes the lights are still on!) a place I can just advertise my novels and my occasional ramblings; A place where old friends can find me, and new people can reach out to me. I look at the page view counter at 330,000 views and think wow. Then I look at my book downloads at 180 and see the reality of life, that almost all of my visitors are probably just bots, scraping the web for all the crap that’s left now the AI companies have taken all the low-hanging fruit.
I used to think if I wrote a couple of good novels, that somehow magically everyone would see them, read them, and the world would become my oyster, but my total earnings from writing is sub $100, every cent of that from the downloads off my website, and the Buy Me A Coffee link. I still haven’t received a cent off Amazon or any of the other sellers, and my strategy of giving books away free to anyone who asks nicely does not really help here. But a few have enjoyed them enough to email and ask when my next book is..
Sigh! I do love writing, but I am also a bit of a perfectionist on the story; the last book almost wrote itself because I loved the characters and the story. Not so much luck at the moment though, I have probably wrote 150,000 words and tore up 130,000 of those, I don’t even know if it will be fantasy or sci-fi, but it will happen, I can feel I’m getting there; Not because I have too little story, but because I have too much! Basically I am happy at the moment to just keep tapping away and making it something I can be proud of.
The incentive to write however, is certainly not financial, as nobody is stumbling upon this site by accident, and bots don’t buy books. Most sites I used to frequent are now over-moderated or becoming a bit toxic, which for someone whose humour level is still stuck in the 1980’s is not good. The old twitter, now X, is the only real site where you can still self-promote yourself and your work (and as a bonus the crowd their usually does not mind 80’s humour), so I now have an account there. It is really just another channel to try and get recognition, though I expect, like this site, it will be forever lost in the noise. I have however, spent the last few weeks doom-scrolling, following and un-following people and I can see where the addition comes from. It seems weird un-following someone, but just because I like their technical post, does not mean I want to hear everything going on in their life or their political rants, and some people are really prolific. Like hackernews and hackaday however, I do however like replying to interesting subjects, and I now realise why I should never download it onto my phone. So yes @boz_brown is live, but don’t expect anything sensible on it.
