Teochew Thunder: Year Seven (Part 1/2)

The blogging year of 2021 has been a challenging one to complete, to say the least. I was in school for Data Analytics (more on that in a later blogpost). As a result, there were a ton of ideas I have yet to implement. All the new shit I learned from work and school over the course of the year has also given me plenty of ammunition for future blogposts. Yep, I'm not running out of material anytime soon.

Year Seven!

From 2014, seven years have passed and I'm still going strong in the material department. Some of it is timeless, like tech principles and analogies; and some of it is very time-dependent, like breaking news. Therefore, the time-dependent news will always take precedence over the timeless pieces. I know I've said this before, but if I'm going to repeat something yearly, this would be it.

In fact, for just about the entire year of 2021, aside from struggling with the COVID-19 situation (which, if I'm being honest, was a lot less of a struggle for me than most people) I was also attending school for Data Analytics. This made it a challenge to write at all, but thankfully I had a lot of archived backlog material.

Content for Year Seven

There's been a fair bit of content I managed to get out of the way, stuff I've been stewing on a while now. As mentioned before, a lot of material is left on the backburner precisely because more time-relevant material keeps coming up.

More blogging material.

Web Tutorials. This has been an awesome year for web tutorials. I covered ReactJS, VueJS and D3 in addition to my usual staple of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I even got to do yet another animated SVG!

Reviews. This has made up a huge, huge chunk of this year's content. Especially Reference Reviews. In stark contrast with previous years, there were only two App Reviews. I'm achieving balance... I hope!

Spot The Bug. This feature has been maintaining its presence at an average of three posts a year. I'm happy to report that sometimes I feature bugs other than those from PHP and JavaScript.

Listicles. These are always fun to write, and I generally try to avoid overdoing them. But this blogging year has been great; I really indulged in ten-item listicles.

News. Much of tech news was dominated, or at least shaded by COVID-19. There was generally less of this tech news going around, at least after the first quarter of this blogging year.

War stories. Now this was a big one, at least around the middle of the year. I related the entire saga of how I went through another three jobs in one year, and did some things I'm not entirely proud of.

Profanity Alert. Also happy to report that I've managed to keep the profanity at a minimum for the most part. I've always felt this was a particular weakness of mine - the need to swear even casually. Like, why? There are so many points that translate just as well without needing to drop an F-bomb.

What qualifies for a multi-parter?

Sometimes readers may notice that I split certain blogposts up into multiple parts. For web tutorials, this is a no-brainer. Some code has so many moving parts that attempting to digest it in one sitting is just insanity.

Splitting stuff up.

For other blogposts, they're usually split up thematically. For the blogpost 2020 - Three Jobs In A Year, I split it into the first job, second job and last job. For a more technical post, I may decide to split it into multiple parts, each part dedicated to exploring one aspect of the whole. This may result in multiple really short blogposts, like with Choosing Between CSS and SVG, but length was never the decider.

The typical blogpost outline

I would also like to dedicate a little space to describe the anatomy of a typical TeochewThunder blogpost. When I say "typical", I mean blogposts that aren't featured posts like listicles, web tutorials, Spot The Bug or reviews.

Usually I start off with a preface. A bit of preamble, if you will. But not too much - even my preamble tends to get to the heart of the matter pretty quickly. I mean, it's not like I'm being paid by word count or something. Heck, it's not like I'm being paid for this at all.

Anatomy of a blogpost.

That's when the body of the blogpost comes in. It is usually split into sections with a heading, and each section typically has an image or video, to break up the monotony.

Finally, there's the conclusion, which is typically just the couple paragraphs. Followed by my signoff, of course, which is usually a nice (or really terrible) pun.

What I do in the creation of a blogpost is write out a brief outline with placeholders for all the above elements, then flesh these out over time. It's a lot easier than attempting to execute them in sequence, and provides at least some sense of progress.

Next

While 2021 wasn't a great year for this blog, let's at least check out the crowd-pleasers!