‘My name is Norman and I am a blogoholic.’

Two years ago, I started this blog purely as an experiment to see what all the fuss was about.

Two years ago, I didn’t even know what blogging was. I certainly didn’t expect that I would still be doing it two years later.

I didn’t anticipate that I would subsequently play with themes, plug-ins, spend money on a domain, migrate to my own WordPress blog and eventually add Adsense.

During the first year (honeymoon period), I enjoyed monitoring the traffic statistics for my hosted WordPress blog.

Much to my surprise, I discovered that I actually enjoyed writing. Initially, I thought I might be capable of creating a technical blog about Siebel and/or Oracle but I soon discovered that I preferred to post anecdotes from my tedious life as a IT consultant.

As a consequence of creating the blog, I learned about various blogging platforms (Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal, Typepad, Habari and Google Pages)

I also learned about RSS, various Web 2.0 tools (Bloglines, Reader, Netvibes, Blinklist, Feedburner) and signed up for various social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn).

Most importantly, I made a handful of new friends that I am still in regular contact with.

Then one night, I sat in a Dublin hotel room, staring at a pint of Guiness and mindlessly pressed ‘Publish’. Seconds later, I then immediately stared at this particular vacuous post and thought ‘What am I doing ? Why am I doing this ? What is the point ?’

After two years, I was blogging purely because of the self-imposed pressure to create content. Content that was valueless, worthless and pointless.

So, suddenly and spontaneously, I decided to take a break because I simply couldn’t be bothered any more. Blogging just wasn’t fun any more.

After one day, I still checked for comments, scanned the Web server logs and reviewed my precious Adsense revenue.

After two days, I read my RSS feeds for blog comments and examined my pretty Google Analytics charts.

After three days, I strongly resisted the urge to check anything.

After five days, I didn’t do anything. I didn’t feel obliged to write a blog article. I didn’t feel obliged to comment. I didn’t feel obliged to scan any of my 167 feeds.

After seven days, I forgot I had a blog. I actually talked to friends and family. The feeling of liberation was surprising.

After nineteen days, I realised blogging was an addiction. An addiction that didn’t fit well with my obsessive personality.

After twenty eight days, I realised my blog was now two years old (I started my blog the day after WordPress launched). An interesting experiment which had now naturally drawn to a close.

So I was sorely tempted to close the blog down.

But then Doug said he liked ‘Prince’ so I had to start all over again.