One of my favorite authors is John Scalzi. He’s a Hugo award winning speculative fiction author that has had an active blog, Whatever, since 1998. In a recent post titled “How to Weave the Artisan Web” he encourages his readers to start their own blogs. In part, this is an effort to take back the web from social media powerhouses like Twitter and Facebook. I spend most of my time on the internet doom-scrolling, so I thought his suggestion was a good idea. It’s time to stop being a passive internet user and start contributing!
This isn’t actually my first attempt at being a contributor. Back in 2013, I decided I wanted to try my hand at creating fun and quick videos explaining concepts in astrodynamics. I was pleasantly surprised at how well the videos turned out. Here’s a link to the YouTube Orbit Nerd channel. If you search for terms like “mean anomaly” and “true anomaly” my videos are the first results that appear. That’s something that I’m secretly proud of.
Unfortunately, I also learned that creating even low-budget videos is a very time consuming process. Each of those videos took between 8 and 12 hours to produce; this wasn’t how I wanted to spend my free time!
I retained the domain orbitnerd.com through all these years even though I haven’t been creating new videos. Since I have that domain around, maybe I could produce similar content in a different medium with a much lower time commitment. This blog will be an area where I will share my current thoughts on topics such as programming, space systems, and the like. I’ll probably also post other things to, as my whims take me.
Thus begins my humble contribution to the artisan web! Thanks for joining me!