This post is an account of my first month blogging and to announce my return. I started these two blogs at WordPress.com in a single month, one in English (Machine Intelligence ?) and another in Portuguese (Videlicet). It was my first experience on blogging and I started with a little doubt if it wasn’t that a bad move. My first post wasn’t much more than a standard dummy Hello World. And then I started doing tests for a more serious job, that was my primary reason for blogging: reporting technical matters and discussing them with interested people. For doing this I needed LaTeX support, and this is the main reason for my choice of WordPress and concerning this, I can say that I am very satisfied ! My first posts in Machine Intelligence ? were then to test the LaTeX support and I did five posts on this subject:

• Basics and overview
• Use of mathematical symbols in formulas and equations
• Multiline equations, systems and matrices
• Fine-tunning and some extras
• LaTeX – extra examples and some bugs

However, to my surprise, the first post reported almost 3000 views in the same first day it was published, and I got nice comments on it. This was really very stimulating ! I show below a graph with the first month of activity on both blogs. Machine Intelligence ? has now a steady average activity of around 30 views a day, while Videlicet got its peak on mere 67 views and reached a steady average of around 3 views a day.

Stats on my blogs Machine Intelligence ? and Videlicet during the first month. Notice the two distinct vertical scales.

However, I am also satisfied with Videlicet, it is doing its job ! It was devised to be a means of connecting longer with my undergrad students and the statistics shows a more intense activity when the first homework report was about to reach its deadline. And the number of views was very consistent with the size of my classes (total of 160 students of Electrical Engineering sophomores). I started with three posts on basic electricity:

• Propagation of systematic measurement errors
• Ohm’s law
• Nonlinear resistors and incremental resistance

Blogging has been a great experience and it increased the interest of people on my activities, and received good feedback, although not as comments directed to my posts, as I expected, but as personal communications. Anyway, I recommend for the ones that are still in doubt about starting a blog: try it, at least !  I sometimes heard rumors against blogging, but when asking the contenders, I got no reasonable points, except a pure personal resistance against something they haven’t done a serious evaluation.

Now, after a period away from here, I’m back, for new postings.