Energy Vanguard Blog

Every business has slow periods. New businesses often have plenty of non-billable time, when the owner(s) and employees can work on things that help ensure success but that are often difficult to find time for once the jobs start rolling in. How you use those slow periods can make the difference between a business that goes on to have great success or one that flops.

A magician doesn't reveal his secrets, right? So why do those of us who blog and tweet successfully keep telling everyone else not only that they need to jump on the bandwagon but also how to do it. I've written a few articles here about blogging and social media and shown graphs of our tremendous growth in website traffic. But should you really bother? Do you need a blog? Is using social media mandatory?

2013! Can you believe it? We survived the end of the Mayan calendar and are now living in what I like to call the post-non-apocalyptic world. I think that may well be the next hot genre for literature and film. To celebrate our non-demise, I did my usual thing and went to what one attendee described as "the best party in the universe."

Assuming this is my last article of 2012, I'll have published 135 articles by the end of this year. I generally do about 3 per week and cover a lot of ground. The subject matter ranges from in-depth explanations of technical topics to praise for groups doing great work to coverage of events that I attend to wacky articles implanted in my brain by aliens.

I started writing the Energy Vanguard Blog in March 2010 and have published more than 350 articles since then. I love doing it. In fact, I probably love doing it a bit too much. Early on I often published 4 or 5 articles a week, but I'm trying to cut back. My goal lately has been 2 articles a week. I'm breaking my rule by writing this one, so I hope you'll forgive me. These things grab a hold of me, and I just have to write.

Did you make it to Austin last week for the RESNET Conference? Did you catch the presentation that I did with Peter Troast of Energy Circle? Whether you did or you didn't, now you can download the pdf version of the presentation. In it you'll find out:

Because of this blog, I've sharpened my powers of observation by several orders of magnitude. I thought I was a pretty good observer before, with my background in physics, but writing as much as I have these past two years has changed me. I'm always looking at the things around me, stuff I see online, everything people say, dreams, soup cans, potholes, a memory from something that happened ages ago—in other words, everything that comes into my mind—and trying to fit pieces together and see how it might turn into something new for the blog or for my teaching.

It's 2012, and I'm excited about the potential of the new year. I went to Possum Drop to ring in this new year, and we burned another possum effigy, this one loaded with more fireworks than ever and dressed to represent the 1% of fat cat possums who dominate the 99%. Like the Phoenix, the Possum arises from the pile of ashes and regenerates itself for another year of adventure, excitement, and, occasionally, just rolling over and playing dead. (Well, not really. I just made that up, but it sounds good.)

Keeping with my end of the year theme of different lists of the articles I've written over the past year, I now give you my Drives Me Crazy list for 2011, painstakingly narrowed down to my top 5. I may not have used that expression in all of the articles below, but I surely felt it.

Most of my writing here in the Energy Vanguard blog is deadly serious. I write the articles with my brow deeply furrowed, fretting over all the energy that's wasted and comfort opportunities missed because of the problems with the way we build homes and install HVAC systems. But sometimes I just can't help myself and the weirdest stuff emerges from my fingertips, jumps into my laptop, and spreads out through the Interwebs.