When my lovely wife Marisa decided to part ways with Slashfood I assured her it was a good idea. I said, “Now is your chance to build something of your own! No longer do you need to be a slave to a giant corporation telling you what you need to blog about!”
She took my advice and started a very successful canning blog called Food in Jars (go ahead and visit it, and subscribe to the feed. I’ll wait).
Of course, Food in Jars didn’t take off right away. Marisa worked hard on it, posted lots of great stuff, and people took notice (she was even nominated for a fancy pants foodblogging award).
All the while I was thinking, “Hey, if Marisa can do it, why can’t I?!” I’ve been blogging about technology for a good long while for other people.. so why not launch my very own Mac news blog?
I pondered that very question for a few moments and quickly realized that the world doesn’t need yet another Mac news blog. That market is more saturated than something very saturated indeed.
I went back to the drawing board. I thought about what the people I admire in the independent blog publishing world all had in common: passion. That’s the ticket! But what am I passionate about?
Over the last couple of years I’ve written a couple of books, and they haven’t sold too badly (well, I wouldn’t mind it if a few more people bought my Kindle book, but what can you do?). These books are all technical books, you know the sort. They teach folks how to use a piece of software or a gizmo or some such. That’s when it hit me: I enjoy writing tutorials.
Why not launch a blog dedicated to teach people how to use the technology they already have? Brilliant (if I do say so myself!). And so I present to you, uncaring Internet, Scott Explains.
At the moment there is only one post up, detailing how to turn off that dumb ‘Send from my iPad’ email signature that is on by default on Apple’s latest and greatest geegaw, but there will soon be more.
Why launch now? Over the years I’ve had many a great idea but I’ve always been flummoxed by my uncanny ability to over-think things to death. I figured the only way I would actually ever do Scott Explains was by actually launching it.