A blog? In this economy?
I've never been a blog person. Neither keeping up with reading any or writing one. In the past I have had to write weekly blog posts for a college course about open source software contributions that I was making. I did not like it. However, there are definitely things I wish I wrote about and posted somewhere in the past. Whether it be about Magic tournaments I attended, trips I had taken, or thoughts about a movie or restaurant I wish I had written down. Things that I could reminisce about or be reminded of exact details that I no longer remember.
Because I've been picking up and dropping new hobbies every few weeks during quarantine (like I imagine so many others have been), I decided now would be a good time to start one. And while these posts will be available online for all to see, the blog I will be keeping will be primarily for my own sake. A way to read exactly what I was thinking or doing at that point in time.
Why not just post more on social media
While I do post on social media, I believe that with the amount of effort it requires to actually write and publish a blog post, what I will be putting out there will be generally much higher quality and more well thought out. But that's really just a theory I have.
There are other reasons I want to make a blog aside from just "what I make will be better". The lack of other people being able to interact with what I put out means it is much easier to write things more for myself. Social media is also very impersonal. Posts are in a deluge of other's content, so it is very easy to compare what I am putting out to what other people are putting out which is something I do not want to do. It is also too short form. Tweeting a fleeting thought or something stupid I did is one thing, but writing a short review for a fried chicken place is much harder to have on twitter. The tools are technically there to do it, but it would be easy to write in less detail or have thoughts separated from one another.
What exactly do you hope to get out of a blog
During my period socially distancing, I've come to understand the hobbies I actually enjoy more, and why I enjoy them so much more than some other things that I do. I've had a bit of a hole in my hobbies that I have been trying to fill. It is that of a creative artistic outlet. As mentioned I've tried a bunch of things that I have wanted to do in the past but nothing has really stuck. I haven't had a strong sense of wanting to continue any of them. Something I have yet to try, is writing. A blog is a good way to flex my creative writing muscles. I feel as it would be pretty easy to make shorter weekly posts be improve on writing as an actual technical skill, and post short stories or poetry or whatever when I can. It will probably also help bolster my vocabulary and improve my atrocious spelling and typing.
A spot I can post anything that I feel is too much or doesn't fit for twitter or instagram will also be nice. It will probably end up containing a large swath of topics, small dev projects, and food reviews. One of the benefits of writing this post, is I can read this in the future and laugh at myself if I don't follow through with all of these ideas I am having, but I digress. Just a list of pages that can contain anything I want makes trying more things very attractive.
Stay frosty