Blogging is a labour of love but it can also be hard work

Net Results: Weblogging for me is kind of like exercising - you are always glad when you've done it but often it takes a certain amount of motivation to return to it each day or each week.

Then there are the little technical glitches that come between you and your own weblog- online journal-style websites - making it impossible or at least difficult to post.

I've suffered from both forms of blogger's block. For the most part, I really enjoy writing my weblog, which is called Techno/culture and can be found at http://weblog. techno-culture.com.

But sometimes I get out of the habit - like exercise, it should be done daily or several times a week for best results - and it can be hard to get back.

I seem to attract more technical problems than a check-in counter at an airport. I've had issues with various types of software, and difficulties with my wireless network, which I use to get online with the laptop that hosts my blogging software, and problems with my modem (it took me four months - and hours and hours with tech support people - to narrow the problems I was having with the wireless network down to the modem).

So I took several months off writing my weblog as it was too much hassle to have to connect the laptop back to a dial-up internet connection (even the Ethernet connection from the modem would not work except on my desktop system, leaving me blogless).

I'd only just sorted all of this out (by buying a new modem - I am highly sceptical when it comes to sorting out computer hardware that isn't working through downloaded fixes or repairs) when it all crashed yet again.

This time, the problem was due to my blogging software provider deciding to issue an automatic update to the root file for the blogging software product that I use.

For a small number of people - alas, one of them being me - the update stopped the weblog from being able to stream new posts to the weblog site.

So my weblog was still there, and I could use the software to create posts, but they wouldn't upload to the server and thus update my weblog. At such points, you do begin to wonder why you keep bothering at all.

But I love blogging. It is a way to take your interests and find a global audience and, even better, a global community - maybe a modest one and maybe a massive one, depending on what you do and how word spreads about your weblog.

Take any subject and someone out there is covering it on a blog. Some are amateurish, some are highly professional.

Some have famous names behind them (the so-called A-list bloggers, mostly technology-industry or current affairs folk who in some cases were well known before their blog).

Blogging is coming of age in Ireland, too. At first, just a small, scattered community of bloggers tapped their way about the internet, but now the community has expanded to embrace a huge range of Irish-oriented weblogs, some written by people in the country and some by expats.

If you haven't tasted some of the Irish blog offerings yet, I link to a long (but very incomplete) list of them on my own weblog, and you can click and explore from there.

Some of my personal favourites include:

And if you can't find anything that interests you then why not start your own?