On starting a new blog, third time.
Hello everyone!
Quick PS : Hey Herman! There's a good chance you're reading this, as this post will go to moderation before public posting. In which case, I want to say thanks for making this amazing place! Wish you a good (day|night|*time) :wave:
This is the third time I have started on a new blogging platform. My first blog ever was on dev.to, about four years ago. I decided to start blogging after some encouragement from a college senior who had a small tech blog. After searching, I settled on dev.to as it seemed an overall nice, well tuned platform with nice community. I had fun writing my first blogs there, and it had some nice incentives to keep me blogging, such as 4-8-16 week streak badges. To make sure I earned them, I planned my content in advance, occasionally wrote some crappy posts just to meet the timeline, and overall had a great time.
I found several incredible authors there, some getting into deep technical aspects of stuff, some doing crazy stuff just to see how far they can bend programming, and some doing both - for example writing a whole web server in plain bash script. It was fun, and while dev.to had some rough corners they were actively working on polishing them out.
In fact my blogs there was how I got to go on my second blogging adventure - an editor from LogRocket found my blogs pretty decent and asked if I wanted to freelance on their blog. It was a great opportunity for me, and since then I have been writing tech posts there. I got to learn many things from topic research, outline planning to deadline management and communication.
After a while, I got busy with several things, and more-or-less stopped writing blogs on dev.to completely. Thinking about it, I think the reason is that I don't feel fun writing blogs there anymore. I have several drafts there - some are just a list of bullet points, some are almost half-written posts. But when I open the editor there, I just don't feel the excitement I once felt when writing new articles.
For some inexplicable reason, the community there also doesn't feel the same anymore. Not that it has gotten worse, or has a lot of bad/ AI only content - in fact the spam problem there is almost non-existent now, which was in a rage when I joined. But it just doesn't feel the same anymore. A lot of authors I had followed haven't posted in months. Not that this is a complaint on them, of course they have other things to do and got busy with stuff - I would know, I haven't written an article there in the last 6 months!
So here I am, starting another blog. Someone had shared a link of their blog in a newsletter I follow, and it was hosted on bearblog. I have a habit of doing breadth-first-exploration on interesting posts, so after seeing the "made with bearblogs" footer, I had to check it out. The more I explored, the more I felt this to be an interesting place to join. This has a dead-simple, but really useful trending and recents system, a very simple UI, and something about bloat-less, ad-free page is just beautiful.
What finally made me join and write this, is the community. There seem to be a lot of interesting people here, writing about a lot of interesting things. Things that I haven't heard of till now - like how their day is going, which songs they are listening to and what rpg they are playing. While I like that dev.to is a tech blog - that is why I joined it in the first place - I am also interested in a lot of other things. I like learning new things, and writing about them. And maybe that's why I wasn't feeling joy anymore in writing posts on dev.to . Maybe what I want to write is not just tech-stuff anymore, and that isn't a place for non-tech stuff.
Also, I wasn't a part of the original blogging landscape. In fact I believe I barely knew what internet was around that time. So this feels like a nice opportunity to have that experience. To join people as they share things they are interested in, and share the things I am interested in with them. I think not having comments, just a way to upvote, has its charm and is a great way to reduce moderation volume.
So, what am I gonna write here? A lot of things, hopefully! I read a few posts here saying that they use this as a "brain dump" i.e. just write what you are thinking, and don't procrastinate much. I think that is a pretty good idea, and one I will be following. While I might occasionally write tech stuff, I want to write about the non-tech stuff that I enjoy. For now, that primarily includes books, but I think there will also be several other things.
I also want to focus on improving my writing style here, I am more used to a cut-and-dry, to-the-point style of tech blogs. I want to be better at prose, somehow (!).
So yeah, that's what I have for this post today. If you found this (somehow) via my "tech" accounts, consider this a very unrelated thing. Looking forward to write more.
Wish you a good (day|night|*time) :)