Was this blog actually a good idea? Like I had initally thought?

I’m not a natural blogger, because I’m not a naturally outward, ‘talkative’ person that likes to get his own thoughts and experiences down - but I have sought to resolve this for various reasons, many outlined on the introductory blog I wrote 18 months ago, but all of this was couched in the fact that I was an insular person that often left thoughts amorphous, tangled, messy and at the whim of my stored memory banks. Writing ‘stuff’ down was often difficult, and while I always thought that my brain ran faster than my ability to write (my handwriting is frankly atrocious and I party attribute it to that fact) it was getting ridiculous - often rewriting sentences over and over again in an attempt to write the apparently-unwritable. That’s energy and time wasted that could be put elsewhere, either

This was all planned to fix is.

Well, maybe that’s putting too strongly. It was designed to make me ‘less bad’ at writing. Perhaps even putting the dislike of being bad at writing and hence not writing at all, and just sucking it up.

Well, has it worked?

In naturally cliche fashion, yes and no.

I’ve definitely started writing more and putting thoughts ‘on the table’, and have found a good habit at throwing my opinions on music, games and books - a few of the many ways humanity finds to, er, artistically express themselves.¹ And that’s a start, but just a start.

For as good as that’s gone, this blog has been rather bare - and there are still myriad of bits and pieces I still planned to implement (mainly RSS!) and many other things have been left to wither that simply aren’t a very few specific things of this website, my TODO page has been untouched for god-knows-how-long.

I had initially thought this to be a great idea - but I’ve tilted away from doing much programming in my spare time. Doing programming as a full-time job has definitely got me into a bit of rut (nor was I ever an especially great programmer to begin with) and so I’ve gone towards writing to exercise the creative muscles and get the brain juices flowing. I want the energy to go to that, the surrounding fluff that entails promoting that should be as low-effort for maintenance as possible - and something I’ve custom built (even if basic) in a flavour of front-end JS that I don’t touch for a living (Svelte) is not really what I want anymore. I never expected to be perfect on the first try, or at least that’s what I keep telling myself.

All this is to rationalise the concept of this 18 months being a two-steps-forward, one-step-back moment. Admittedly this will mean investing more time into the website, and put a great deal of effort into migrating stuff I’ve already written over the 18 months. But I can see a pseudo-fresh start being a secondary kick to get myself over the line and start blogging in a more regular manner. This will probably go down the route of looking at something designed to be stupid simple but still something I build and quote-on-quote own (so Wordpress is not in the cards, sorry!) - almost certainly a static site generator (SSG) of some form. At the moment I’m planning on looking at Hugo, but will have to see where I end up going.

Just got to find time to slot it into my already rather busy schedule…

And finally, while schedules, routines and rituals are great for keeping yourself on the straight and narrow - sometimes you need to just deliberately break these routines every once in a while.