How Do I Build This Blog

All my high-school classmate known that I am really bad at writing. Things becomes worse when I was in university studying mathematics. I start to void writing at all the cost: I deliberately volunteed the do the coding or maths bit and let others do the writing. Everybody in the group seems like me.

During my study in Warwick University, I fancy the Statistics and really enjoy telling people the relationship I between all sort of facts. Then I come across The Guardian's Data Journalism program which is a term in use since 2009/2010, to describe a journalistic process based on analyzing and filtering large data sets for the purpose of creating a news story¹. I found it is really cool! I tried to analyst a new dataset from World Bank and want to write an article but when I sit down my mind just completely blank. I managed to write a few paragraph but it was really awaful. That was the first time that I thought I wish I have a proper writing skill. I won't bother to learn because I planed to go back to China soon but I decided to work in the UK at the last minute.

Last week, I was doing a statistical consutlantcy project. I was do the analysis, writing code in the morning then try to write it up in the afternoon. I realise it pretty easy for me to do the analysis and coding, but it was really a pain to write it up, but I do enjoy it. So I decided to build a personal blog so that I can practise my writing skill and at the same time, to promote the usage of statistics in daily life.

I have no prior knowledge of building a website and spent couple of evenings/weekends sitting in front of computer at library/caffee and try to learn. This project accros two months and takes me about 20 hours in total to finally build this blog. Motivation really is crucial to learning. What make this learning expeirence really unique is that I have data about my learning.

I have a very good habit: I record every single tasks I do in terms of how much time I spent and what I did. Take this task for example,

PM (strcture)
SCHEDULED: <2014-12-11 Thu 17:45>
:LOGBOOK:  
CLOCK: [2014-12-11 Thu 17:41]--[2014-12-11 Thu 18:28] =>  0:47
:END:      
:PROPERTIES:
:Effort:   0:45
:END:
[2014-12-10 Wed 22:28]
wait for 4 minutes 
- [ ] go though all the headlines,
- [ ] group into few categories, like 1) learn, 2) apply, 3) improve etc.
- [ ] start to edit 

This note includes all the info I need to know:

1. I want to do it On Wed and estimate it takes 45 minutes to compltete
2. I planed to do on Thurs,
3. I started at Thur 17:41, 4 minutes before the scheduled time,
4. It takes me 47 minutes to do the job, 2 minutes longer then expected.
5. what i did, the main body

I gathered all the notes that are relevant to this project and accumulate the time I spent for each sub-tasks. It can be summaries as a table:

It tells that I spent 17 hours and 22 minutes in total on this project. The first question is: what does this 17 hours mean to me? I spent 500hours plus in playing video games between 2013-2014 and I really don't get nothing out of it. I really enjoy this learning experience because I have a definitive goal I want to achieve, then I put effort and I can get some results.

The rest of the table tells me tasks I did in chronological order. The first task was to read the official Jekyll guide and I spent 1 hour 22 minutes. This table looks really awfully and gives you an insight of what a real world data looks like. I don't really know what to do with it. So I have to refers to the way I learn as a child.

From our education system, the way we are learning is that we start on a basic level, we study the topic, apply it, make mistakes, correct it, and continue this process to the next level. It gives me an idea to define "levels". So I skim the whole project, from beginning to end, and grouped the data into five categories:

Basis

the foundation of Jekyll, website and HTML language,

Features

he extended features provided by Jekyll, for example, add social network link, add a discussion/comments,

Workflow

integrate the publishing process to my current workflow and try to automate as much process as possible,

Try

try to impelement something new that for my own needs, or try other people ideas,

Fix

fix problems along the way I build up the website

There is a linear increasing level, and one dependence the previos level. Ideally, the most cost-effective approach for a person to learn, is to focus on step, master it, and then goes to the next. This is the way of our education system. But it won't be the case of a self-study project, which is most likely to be interest-driven. it wold be very interesting to see that how I was jumping between these five levels. I sort out the timeline for each tasks I did and plot the time with levels.

The x-axis is the time line in minutes for this project and y-axis is the level I defined. I can tell which level I am in a studying time. For example, for the first 200 minutes I was studying the basis knowledge, then I spent 35 minutes on Feature and so on.

I am very surprised that I went to workflow level so early, in about 20% of this project. It is actually make a lot sense because this project across 2 months and having a workflow that suitable for me really accelerate this project because It takes no time to pick up after leaving this project for few days.

There was a time that the website is broken and I cannot figure out why. It turned out I missed spelled an configuration file.

Finally I spent some time on googling about how other people use Jekyll and tried quit a few and never goes back to lower level.

It would be also interesting to see how long I spent on each levels, i.e.

The pie chart should be read in clocking-wise direction and it is ordered by levels. I spent 3 hours in Basis level and to be honest I understand much about Jekyll. It is interesting to see that I spent 8% more time on the expanded features than the basic knowledge, i.e. using it rather study the knowledge.

Thanks to all the volunteers that working on connect Jekyll and Org mode. I only spent 3 hours in setting up the workflow that includes write article in Org mode (plain text), convert it to HTML web page, and then upload to my blog. Jekyll is a sophisticated and well tested software that it can be configured easier and I didn't running into any problems.

The rest 5.4 hours was the most inefficient in this project. At that time I was keen to include Table of Content and Code Syntax Highlight in my blog. I did a lot further research for solutions and tried a lot. But none fits well with the foundation I have built up. Some is buggy and create more problems. If you really need these feature, see this blog.

The simple question: is it worth spending 18 hours building a website side? In timewise, I have spent 20 hours on writing, but this number does not count, because I can write without a blog at all. But I feel that having this blog promote me writing because:

1. the writings has their destination. It is not a digital file in my computer that I will forget in few weeks or a page in a notebook I hardly look back with potentially lose. All my writings will be in this single website that has a unique address that everybody can visit it whenever or whatever they are.
2. the aim for writing has been changed. It is not only to express myself, like a daily, but to share an journal to other. I have to consider the reader's feel, will they like it? will they understand it? So, the writing becomes more proactive, more thinking on human relationship, and thus more fun.
3. Writing is linked to this website, which is linked to quantifies-self project and Emacs/org-mode, which then linked back to statistics and programming, which are the two main passion of me. Writing is not something that occurs to my mind one day and then I swear I will master it, but something in my passion network and extended my passion to another area.

[2014-12-19 Fri 13:21] First, quantify my time on learning is

Words: 1657, Write: 5 Hours

Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects The Data Journalism Handbook