In late February 2023 I decided to create a blog. I had already built a lot of webpages using RapidWeaver, which I adopted after Sandvox stopped answering queries in mid-2018. And I still remember first adopting iWeb in 2006, which was discontinued in 2011.
I’ve always tried to keep the page layout super simple, just some text and images. But I was bored, and thought to “rejuvenate” some of those pages by moving to what Wikipedia calls “an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts)”.
Reasons not to create a blog
Create a blog sounds like a good idea, but I actually found it easier to list the reasons why I should not create a blog.
Firstly I didn’t have or want a target audience that was calling out for a blog. Keeping myself happy and active is my only objective. Even my wife didn’t bother to read what I wrote. I hoped she might read my blog, but she didn’t.
In fact I hate the passive connotation of an audience, and I’m not arrogant enough to want to inspire an audience. On top of that, will another text-image based blog inspire anyone these days, when everyone is consuming influencer content from YouTube or TikTok?
The reality is that when I decided to learn about making a blog, I immediately looked for video tutorials, not pages and pages of text in a blog.
I can understand people wanting to craft helpful content. Crafting something that is helpful is certainly a desirable objective, but often the hidden implication is to make money. You can spot this when the term ‘marketing’ rears its ugly head.
But the great thing is that there are people who are simply looking to sharing ideas and expertise, and one way to keep my mind active is to try to understand those ideas shared by others.
I love those moments when suddenly I say to myself, “I didn’t know that” or “now that’s a new way to look at it”.
I like travelling and new tech, and recently I’ve developed an interest in tracing the roots of my family and that of my wife. I hope having my own diary-style, multi-themed blog will better support my interests today.
I’m not looking to grow traffic, or make money or boost my online presence. Frankly, I expect my pages and posts will disappear from the face of the Earth when I do. Who is going to pay the hosting fees for ‘dead content’? Perhaps I should included hosting fees in my last will and testament?
Reasons to create a blog
To learn new skills, to improve my writing ability, and to document a few small facets of my life. And it might even be fun as well! These outweigh the negatives about creating a blog, or do they?
There are some technical reasons for moving to a blog format.
For sometime I had thought about updating the style of my webpages. My webpages tended to look like an indigestible wall of words. Even I had a problem checking the language and spelling through to the last full-stop. Might a diary-style blog help me breakdown my old pages into more digestible morsels?
I looked at how to add a blog to my existing site and I came away more confused than ever – not a good sign. I feared that I might have had to invest too much time and effort into reengineering everything, and still not be happy with the result. Might it not be easier to adopt a market-leader blogging software like WordPress, and just move my existing content, with a good dose of re-editing and simplification?
Another good reason to adopt a blog format was that I often got bogged down in building a new but lengthy webpage. So could a blog help me by offering a more granular way to present things I’m interested in? Allowing my interests and topics to grow organically over time. You may have noticed that “organic” is now used to describe anything that grows naturally over time, including people’s waistlines. I even saw a plant being described as “growing organically”, as if it were a new and novel way to grow.
I also wanted a better way to manage image resources. I was not sure how best to manage image resources, and I expected I was more at fault than the software I used. Also I tended to include image files that were far too big, so I knew I would need to spend time re-formatting the images I used.
Finally, I thought that adopting a blogging format might keep me more engaged with my interests, and give me a better way to express my ideas and manage and organise the content that supported them.
Put in very simple terms, I thought a more bit-by-bit blog format would fit better with my grasshopper mind. Whilst doing one thing, I’m always thinking about something else that over time starts to look more interesting.
The video tutorials I used to kick-start my interest in building a blog, were:-
