Today, I was going to write a review of my blog so far. I started going back through the posts and the first thing I noticed was that it’s really hard to navigate through the posts. So my first point of action is to make sure that all the blog posts have the date of posting there next to the title. The second thing is to make it so that from each post there is a navigation arrow to the previous post and the next post, which surely must be easy to do as I see it in other blogs. Also, I noticed that to begin with I had a cute little form for subscribing to my newsletter at the end of the blogs. I presume that’s just a case of adding some code to the bottom of each post.
The other thing I noticed straight away is that I started the blog in December 2020 and then I wrote posts on 7 January 2021 and 20 February 2021 before hanging up my writing materials for over two years! I hadn’t realised I’d done so little the first time around and I also thought I’d gone back to it at some point in between then and now. I remember that I spent loads of time in November and December doing research and trying to come up with a name for the blog and then just all the technical stuff of making it look even vaguely ok. I mean I’m still not massively pleased with it but honestly the problems I had just trying to get the most basic things on there! I really used up all my initial enthusiasm on technical stuff while kind of ignoring the writing side of things.
This time, since April of this year when I started again, I’ve focused entirely on the writing side to the exclusion of everything else, and it’s worked in the sense that I’ve managed to build a consistent blogging habit. The next step though is to try to move on from that to building more strategy in there, without ruining my enthusiasm for actually writing. Even just going through and trying to write down all the days when I’ve written, the titles of the posts, and a summary of what I wrote, seems like a lot of work and I’m already wondering if there’s an easier way to do it. I think it would help to try to categorise the posts as well, and be a bit more strategic with the tags. To be honest, I don’t really understand the difference between categories and tags. What are they each used for? I tend to select a few tags for each post just because it’s fairly easy to do, but I don’t ever do anything with them. In terms of categories, trying to assign just one category to each post, I can imagine I would struggle with that. I can imagine I wouldn’t know whether something should go under running or habits or health etc. Hence why I haven’t used the categories yet. But I think it might be helpful going forward.
So this isn’t a review of the blog so far but maybe just a first step towards that. I feel like blogging takes me a lot longer than it should do, and that’s why I end up never doing the technical side of things because it always feels like a bit of a waste of time. I know it probably is necessary but it always takes me so long and often I don’t even manage to achieve what I set out to do. Right now, for example, I might go and try to put the dates on all the posts. But will I manage to do it, and how long will it take me? Should I be doing something else with my time today? I feel like this is a constant battle for me – trying to figure out what I should do with my time. To the extent that I don’t really get anything done.
The best thing I’m doing at the moment with this blog, though, is posting as often as I can, no matter what. Even if I’m not particularly happy with what I write. I’m proud of that. Certainly, I’m doing better than I have done for the last two years of not posting. But I think now it is time to try to move things on a bit, to try to gain a bit more coherency in what I post, a bit more structure, and put a bit more thought into what I write. Let’s hope I can achieve that going forward…