For about 6 to 8 years now I have been toying with my hobbies, producing code for my own self interest / learning, and trying to figure out how to get over my own introverted ways to share what I have learned. I have never been diagnosed with ADHD but I always find my interest varying from one topic to the next to the point where I get completely overwhelmed or feel like I am an imposter. This in turn leads me to not engage or post. Hence this article and exploring a general plan to overcome these issues.

Having Your Own Domain

Roughly 6 to 8 years ago I procured the domain codemelted.com. I did this to procure a professional looking email address. This also secured handles on different social media platforms. Having your own domain allows you to provide a digital identity to the online world. This is the first step for allowing you to have a space you call your own to share your work.

Email

Eight years ago I was looking for different jobs and my personal email address was not very professional. The personal domain solved this issue. Now I am not an online influencer, but a professional email provides the ability to expand business inquiries and other collaboration opportunites.

Static Website

A static website provides a landing page for those interested in your topics. This also serves as the place where you share your content to social platforms. Third party sites exist for you to produce / host your content. You are however beholden to those platforms. This means your content conforms to their look and feel, standards, and rules. Having your own static site gives you the greatest control in implementing your own style vs. the limitations of the third party services.

NOTE

This is not a dig at third-party services. Go with what fits your content needs.

Blogging

Writing articles helps improve your writing style and organization of your thoughts. A survey I did on BlueSky and Google searches states an ideal blog article should be no more than 1,000 words and under 10 minutes to read. Other google searches reveal that you should aim to produce roughly 2 to 4 articles per week.

For the codemelted.com/blog the articles will be on a variety of topics based on my site mantra:

A father who is a software engineer that enjoys STEM fields, amateur photography, the outdoors, and nerd culture just attempting to make sense of this world.

Developer

The codemelted.com/developer will capture the work on the CodeMelted DEV Modules. These modules serve to explore the development of Progressive Web Applications (PWA) to allow the greatest reach to end users. This stems from my early career work in Java targeting multiple platforms. Later in my career I would come to realize Java’s shortcomings as follows:

“Write once, run anywhere (WORA)” was the famous slogan made by Sun Microsystems in 1995. At the time, this technology allowed for easy full stack engineering allowing you to target dedicated workstations and on premise servers. So long as a Java Runtime Environment existed, you could run your code. Java was unable to keep to their slogan as web browsers became more advanced, mobile devices became ubiquitous, and companies no longer required dedicated servers.

Photography

The codemelted.com/photography will house my amaetur photography.  As an owner of a Jeep Wrangler, I have travelled to many neat places to go camping, hiking, and take nature photography. This is a capture of this hobby along with telling the stories behind the photography. This will feed into the blog and video content.

Content Production Lifecycle

Informing

We are all consumers of information. For the purposes of this article, the information comes from social networks, life / work experience, and media consumption. One should take this information and keep a list of topics to later produce content.

Producing

The content produced will be reflected in the three identified areas of this site. The developer / photography will be updated regularly. These will also serve to produce blog articles along with other topics. All of these serve to produce engagement.

Engagement

This part of the process is probably the most tricky for people. My goal will be as follows on my site:

1. Write / share at least 2 – 4 articles per week.
2. Share pictures from the hosted photography.
3. Produce presentations / videos based on the articles.

This will then be shared on social media to drum up engagement. The social media in the picture will be my primary focus of engagement.

Newsletters / Podcast

This serves as the final output of my content lifecycle. Here I will stitch together the content produced over two weeks as follows:

1. Buy Me a Coffee Newsletter: This will summarize the previous two weeks of content production, links to that content, and upcoming content plans.
2. GitHub Newsletter: This will provide the progress made on the CodeMelted DEV Modules project highlighting milestones and next updates to the project.
3. YouTube Podcast: A reading of these newsletters to provide a summation of what is going on with this site.

Conclusion

The goal of this article was to articulate my thoughts into how a single person can produce content and stay engaged. The article introduces my website, identifies how I plan to engage, and a rough schedule for content production. Now to keep to schedule 🙂.