I started to appreciate bloggers and YouTubers this year. We’ve got many, many people pushing great content into the Internet for free, and let me tell you: I’m not one of them.
After understanding that writing on a regular basis is important, I’ve tried to do one blog a week.
One blog a week. Really. This isn’t that much if you think about it. I believed that it’d be around 30 minutes of writing and maybe several more on proofreading and publishing, but it’s official – I’ve failed.
Failure reasons:
it’s hard to find a proofreaders for technical content, unless you ask friends, who never have time, or always find your stuff “very interesting”
publishing takes more than 30 minute
you run out of topics
you get pushed in real-life and work, and have little energy left at the end of a day
you’d rather write software than blog posts
“other people will do it for me”
Any of these reasons is valid and holds true and I fell into the trap. So as of today, my statistics look like this:
$ la 2016-0* | grep -v book | wc -l
8
How to read this: this year not counting books I’ve written 8 blog posts. It should have been something close to 50. This needs changing, and I think one of the things I’m going to be exploring is just plain old stupid Wordpress.
Reason?
Simply read this (I fully agree): Static generators focus on the wrong thing. If you didn’t know, the way I write this blog post is by opening a simple notepad, writing text, and then using this thing called Middleman. And this file later turns into the website. This works well until you have 200 pages (which I do – check my reading section). Then it takes a long time..
Other than that I need to tie myself with a schedule for writing. As of now I’m ignoring my Wednesday reminder “To write!” and my Saturday’s reminder to “proofread”, but I think this needs to change too.
The biggest reason is basically: if time for writing comes, I would much rather write software than text, most often. Also topics which I pick sometimes appear relevant to whatever I’m doing at that very moment. So sometimes it’s iOS related, sometimes it’s Mac or UNIX, and sometimes about business. Unclear if people would actually enjoy reading un-specific stuff like this.
Things I’ll be exploring:
Writing as I go. Work on Sensorama led to a lot of studying and discovering, and I feel like I’ll have to review the GitHub repo to come back to some of the ideas and conclussions I’ve reached during writing of it.
It’s just November, but these are my reflections.
What is your system for pushing content regularly?