I've tried to start a blog so many times but I've always become so bogged down in the aesthetic aspects of the blog that I've become distracted from the real purpose of having a blog in the first place - to write content!
As a professional web-developer, I've also been easily distracted by cool things I've seen on other blogs that I've wanted to implement myself. New ways of managing a taxonomy. Better waits to manage the interface. Widgets. Oh, so much time lost, playing with widgets.
And then there's the platforms that I've tried. I've tried blogging on Blogger.com, I've had numerous blogging iterations on Wordpress, and I've dallied with various other platforms such as Joomla (yuck) and Ghost (so lovely), but nothing has really stuck and I've created and deleted more blogs than I can remember.
According to research, this isn't unusual. SEO guru, Neil Patel has some interesting things to say about it.
As I mentioned above, a large part of my problem is that as a web-developer, I get too hung up on the technical aspects of the blog rather than just using it as a tool, and that's before I've started wasting time trying to make it look pretty.
This time around, I decided to make a list of what really mattered to me as a (potential) blogger and I came up with these points:
When I looked over the list above, I realised that Wordpress was definitely not an option (because of the hacking attempts, especially).I also realised that Wordpress, Joomla, and a lot of the other platforms that I've played were simply too complicated. They were filled with complicated bells and whistles that are fun to play with but they get in the way of actually writing anything. They were definitely out. I need to get away from technical distractions.
It wasn't long before I discovered static websites - where content is written in Markdown files on my local machine, convered to a static website and published to a remote web-server via a GIT push.
This seemed like a great idea but writing the markdown files locally still tied my writing to my local laptop. If I didn't have my laptop, I'd be unable to write a new post. I also found that the mechanisms for converting my local Markdown files were a bit of a faff to use, largely being terminal-based.
There was one really nice application I tried called Publii that made this process much easier. I almost settled on it but some functionality was only available through paid extensions and I didn't want to spend money on something I wasn't sure it was suitable.
The idea of using Markdown files was really appealing though - as simple text files, they'd be really easy to backup... if only they were already in the cloud, I'd be able to edit them anywhere.
But at least I'd concluded that I needed a flat-file, online CMS. This is basically a lightweight web-application that enables me to write without requiring a database to store the text. It turns out that there's a few of them.
I've finally settled on a much simpler platform than any I've tried previously and I'm hoping that will prevent me from getting distracted so that I can just write. As a bonus, because it saves each blog entry as a markdown file, I can easily backup my content.
I'm writing this in Markdown right now, online, and it's great. The editing environment is full screen so there are no distractions and I've written more in the last twenty minutes than I've literally written in months.
I'm hoping this will lead to me finally making writing a regular activity.
People have been crying out that blogging has been dead for years, saying things like "People only read social-media posts, now!"
The good news is those people aren't necessarily right. In fact, other people like entreprenaur influencer, Luisa Zhou believe blogging is going to continue to grow in the coming years.
The truth is, does it matter? Writing should be an activity that is undertaken for the joy of writing rather than to satisfy others.
Writing solely for the consumption of others is self-defeating because consumers consume and move on. They care little for the fulfilment of the writer and if the writer's only sense of purpose is in the number of likes and comments they might receive, they will become so demoralised at the lack of engagement that they will soon cease to write.
Now that I'm older, I'm no longer naive enough to believe that people are going to be reading what I write. That doesn't mean that I don't want to grow an audience. Of course I do, but it also means that I'm not going to be begging for the crumbs of approval that might fall from their table.I'm sure that, if I keep writing, I'll slowly grow an audience of followers that actually enjoy what I write. In a world of (currently) almost eight billion people, it's a statistical possibility, at least.
Either way, I don't want to write in a desparate attempt to grow an audience. I want to write to get better at it.
That's my purpose. I'm going to be blogging to improve my writing because up until now, I've not been very good at it.
Cover photo by Antonia Lombardi on Unsplash.