Of Blogging, Praying and Diarrhoea

I work in the IT industry but I seldom write about IT-related matters in my blog. Maybe it's because I produce a lot of technical writing as part of my daily job and it feels a bit abhorrent for me to dwell on the subject further in my blog.

Blogging is something I try to do daily--using time I steal in between major tasks. I learn from Muslims who find time to pray five times a day; blogging once a day, in comparison, can't be that tough, can it? To me it serves a similar purpose as a daily prayer: I reflect on things and remind myself of things that are important. It is different from writing in your own private journal. To me putting your thoughts to public scrutiny forces you to be responsible and accountable for your views--it is as serious as vowing to God in prayer.

By publishing to a blog, my faults are more glaring, the weaknesses in my writing more evident. And I always learn from every blog entry, even when no one bothers to read them. I think of my blog as my daily "exercise book"--the type of cheap ruled notebooks with brown covers that we used when we were school-children.

I admire many other blogs which contain good images and pictures. My blog is dull and devoid of pictures at the moment and unfortunately will remain so for a while as managing a "proper" website is too time-consuming a task for me. I can be quite fussy when it comes to web design. It is something that's very creative and interesting. And I do have lots of digital pictures that I can share.

I want to make blogging as something natural and effortless. Sometimes, I am too tired to tackle more serious subjects and just write to "fill up the space".(Today's entry is an example). At times it is like a diarrhoea purge. And my mind does feel lighter after every act of blogging. (My spelling improves too, as I have to take the trouble to look up words like "diarrhoea").

And because I always provide links to subjects that I refer to in my blog, blogging serves as a guide for surfing to me. For instance, I learnt from this diarrhoea website that more than 3,000 people actually died of diarrhoea today (the figure is rising as we speak). And there are also interesting articles about prayer being good for health.

What happens to your blog when you die? There's a non-profit organization who has plans to help archive these dead sites...