IT|Redux turns six month old today, and I wanted to take advantage of this milestone to share some insight with you, loyal reader of my ramblings. After 182 posts and 577 comments, it’s time for a status check.

IT|Redux was started on December 1st, 2005. If you can multiply 182 by 2, you should realize that I consistently published one post a day, every day of the week, for six consecutive months. No more, no less. There is a good reasons for this: as any regular human being, I am naturally lazy, and without a goal to motivate myself, I would quickly drop the ball. Hence, I make a point to publish no less than a post a day. But because blogging can quickly turn into some nasty addiction, I also make sure never to make more than a post a day. I know that other active bloggers have adopted the same discipline, and it saved my marriage so far. I hope it saved theirs too.

Now, this lofty goal is not an easy one to accomplish, as you can imagine. Things get even harder if your writing style is the one of an essayist rather than the one of a newscaster — irrespectively of the quality of the output. Everyday, you must come up with a new idea, develop a story around it, craft a compeling introduction that will serve as an excerpt, and summarize everything into a tagline that will stand out among the list of hundreds if not thousands of posts that show up daily on the screen of experienced blog readers.

More often than not, there is not enough time in a day to come up with the prized post. In such instances, the task is deferred to the next day, and so for many days in a row when the writer’s schedule gets compromised by real-work commitments or travels to faraway places, or both. Sometimes, my backlog is more than a week long, which explains why you might not see any posts on this blog for many days in a row.

Nevertheless, such professional obligations are no excuses for not writing the mandatory daily post. Therefore, when things settle down and I finally manage to get some free time available — usually during week-ends, I write multiple posts in a row and backdate them. But when so doing, I make sure of one thing: I never write about a subject that I could not have written about at the time the post is dated for, based on the information that could have been available to me at the time. This ensures some kind of temporal integrity, while leaving me the opportunity to think things through. All in all, I actually think that such a process leads to less impulsive posts that can develop a story more fully.

In the past six months, two main things have happened: Office 2.0 grew much faster than anyone could have anticipated, and the same is true for Intalio. It is too early to draw any conclusion, but a look back at my inferences for 2006 — which I will fully revisit on December 31st, 2006, should give us a good perspective on what is to be expected for the next five to six months.

In the meantime, I thank you very much for reading these lines and must request something of you: if you catch me making some grammatical error or being the victim of a typographic bug (coquille in French), by all means, let me know. I am here to learn.