Archivo de la etiqueta: blogging

Writing a lot isn’t enough, but not writing is worse

I recently came across an article from a guy who has very interesting thoughts about how to generate a skill. He’s specifically concerned about how to become better at writing, and explains how lots of writing is not enough to become a good writer.

This is something I’ve struggled with too. I’ve been a blogger for many years, but always oscillate between writing a lot and not writing at all.

Let’s think for a second about the mind of someone who writes a blog. They don’t think about money (blogging rarely becomes a serious business), they don’t do it to sell anything. They just think they have something inside and want to throw it at the world. Blogging is an act of ego, it’s about what one thinks of himself, and as such, it must be perfect.

A blogger cares a lot about what others think of them, which is exactly how one becomes a perfectionist. As a perfectionist, writing is an uphill battle: bloggers end up spending many hours on a single article, most of which is just reviewing and editing.

In his article, my blogger makes really good points about how you can’t just write an article and thoughtlessly publish it. Our mind has different levels of focus, and keeps working on a task even while we are not actively doing it (this is 100% true by the way), so he suggests to let articles «marinate» before publishing them.

I agree with these ideas, but I think it’s counterproductive for someone who still in the habit forming phase. Caring too much about how good an article is will make us dread writing it, and thus kill any chance of forming an habit to write.

Unless you really want to be a professional writer, I think blogging must be, first of all, for ourselves. A self-care act, even. Perfectionism is how you end up dreading the task: just thinking about the things I need to get right to publish a really good article makes me not want to write ever again. And it’s absolutely impossible to create a habit if you start by dreading the very same habit you’re trying to create.

To me, the whole idea of «letting articles marinate», is also a perfect recipe for failure. At least at the beggining. If you really want your articles to be better the first step to improve is to avoid dreading the task. Just write, forget if it’s good or bad, it will become better with time.

As we keep growing, we will start structuring the text better, making less mistakes, and improving. We might also start spending more time on each article if we grow an audience, it’s much easier to spend time on it if we know there’s people who care about and are waiting for it.

The comment section passionate writer

Writing is hard. You need to figure out what you want to write about, find time to actually do it, find out how to structure your ideas in an interesting manner and finally, actually get to it.

Intending to do that with any kind of regularity (let alone to do it daily) is hard. Really really hard.

Regularity has always been my weakest point. I’ve always thought highly of myself, and have some notion of what I could achieve if I got to find some kind of regularity in my life. If I was able to spend some amount of time, every day, focused on achieving a specific goal, I’m pretty sure I would eventually achieve it.

But that’s where things get hard. You can start writing in your blog for one day, two days, a week, two weeks. When will engaging in such an activity become too unmotivating? When will booting up the game console become much easier than writing?

My bursts of determination inevitably end up converging in a specific kind of activity. I’d call it something like «the comment section passionate achiever». It’s what happens after 3 hours of not doing what you should be doing on the Internet. You enter a post about a topic you’re interested in, you enter the comment section, and find out someone (usually an anonymous commenter just like you) had the courage to be wrong on the Internet.

What follows is a no less than 35 or 40 minutes session of passionate writing. I find myself effortlessly articulating my opinion about the topic. Not only that, I find myself looking for the perfect structure to make sure that my comment leads to any reader’s conclusion that this guy is incredibly wrong.

After that, I realize I have done it: I fooled myself into being productive. I just did what I was supposed to do regularly and didn’t even blink an eye. Of course, I did all of that in the one place where it cannot possibly lead to anything that makes it worth it. My comment will get lost in the bast abyss that is the Internet, and the other guy will, in the best case scenario, diagonally read my opinion without and of course he won’t change his opinion in the slightest.

Why I switched back to WordPress

A few years ago I decided to host my blog in a static GitHub pages generated through Jekyll.

I had a bunch of really good reasons to do that. I sincerely believe that we often abuse dynamic sites these days, and that a personal blog is a use-case that can be perfectly addressed with a static site.

Why spend a huge amount of resources every time you load a site, if you can go through all of that once, and just serve the same result every time someone asks for it? I think platforms like WordPress are missing an opportunity to save lots of resources by pre-generating all the content that is not supposed to change in a site.

The only part of a website that could require some dynamic load in a blog is the comments section, which due to user’s interactions, would be potentially impractical to pre-generate every time someone adds a comment. And even in this case I have some ideas about it: the backend could save a copy of the generated comments section every time someone contributes, and keep it until there’s a new one.

There’s lots to be explored in this area and we don’t even need to give up many of the features that we enjoy on dynamic sites, but seems like there is no platform like that nowadays.

The process to write a post using Jekyll was cumbersome: it required to remember too many steps, I had to think about Markdown, git repositories, compiling Jekyll… It’s by no means a complicated process: for someone like me with a career in computer science, it’s really easy to understand. But it’s cumbersome.

Having to go through this whole process meant that I rarely wrote posts. And what’s the point of having a super-efficient blog engine if I don’t write posts at all?

WordPress, on the other hand, has a beautiful editor, with automatic draft saving, an actual UI to set up tags, attributes, images… God, even something as basic as the post date setting up automatically to the date when I publish my posts (this is something that I need to manually setup on Jekyll).

Another feature that I didn’t realize I was going to miss so much are statistics. For my Jekyll page I basically gave up to have any kind of stats. I had analytics through Cloudflare’s platform, but these were basically useless. Most hits came from search engines or web crawlers. I tried to use Google Analytics as well, with similar results; GAnalytics seems to be great but also too complex for a simple blog. WordPress analytics turn out to be an awesome noise filter and the ones that better represent actual people entering my site.

I figured I would be able to write blog posts «only for myself», and not care at all about who reads it. In practice the lack of feedback makes it extremelly unmotivating and even worse. Just knowing that someone got to open it and saw that I wrote something (let alone read it) is so much better.

The truth is that having a platform designed to write and manage posts is a frequently overlooked key benefit of a specialized tool like WordPress. Being able to code-less configure every aspect of my site, or change its appearance on the fly; as well as understanding the level of reader engagement and recognizing what you’re doing right or wrong.

Sometimes you need to lose something to appreciate what it’s worth. I still firmly believe in the benefits of statically hosted sites, but in the future I will be mindful of all the other needs I must meet.