Re: Blogging Balance

How much and what to write is a struggle for some people, but I personally think that it's no big deal, and writing what you want regardless of what other says is usually fine

Blogging Balance

When advising someone to just blog whatever they want and not worry about "people who aren’t interested in that stuff", Robert ends up realizing he has the same issue!

Read the Full Post by Robert Birming on his website

Robert says:

In my case, I think it’s a constant journey of trying to find that “perfect” blogging balance. Trying to figure out the right ingredients based on some made-up recipe in my head of what’s too much or too little.

For me, I think that if “I could write this” comes across my mind even for a second, I generally just do it.

That’s how the past two blog posts have been, actually. If you read them carefully, you will probably notice that almost every paragraph is its own little idea that only barely threads with the title of the post.

Actually, many of my posts during the past year or so were are made of paragaphs written at different times throughout the day, or even multiple days. When I run out of steam, I just let it simmer for a bit, do something else, come back to it after a while, and I’ll usually figure out how to continue.

In the end, I approach the same general concept from multiple perspectives. It isn’t too pretty, but it works out most of the time.

I am not always satisfied with the initial output, my last post about a future without work was quite a ramble, with no clear real connection between paragraphs, I kind of didn’t like it at first, but after leaving it a few days and returning to it, I managed to add that little extra that turned it into a bit of a favorite now.

Some days I write about less abstract stuff and things just flow naturally on a single sitting, without losing threads and sticking to a topic. That’s the case for most of my posts, honestly. From time to time, I will truly get into the zone, and output something really inspired, but that’s pretty uncommon for me.

Of course, sometimes I decide to not share a post, but I usually stop really early on when I realize it isn’t worth it. That bar, for me, is quite low, as long as I can say enough about it.

You see, lately, my brain just doesn’t like to see short blog posts that much—I mean posts that are only 3 or 4 paragraphs long!—I think “Hey, I could add an extra paragraph or two”, so I try to do it. This results in perfectly serviceable posts getting stuck as a draft because my brain doesn’t realize they are fine already.

I used to share posts around 200 words, but now I barely post things below 600. Even my weeknotes now go beyond 1000K words somehow, when I added a links section to them!

Sidenote: I should find out my average word count per year.

This year my blogging has been extremely consistent, I haven’t missed a week! Which is something that hasn’t really happened before for multiple months in a row, I may even do 150 articles by the end, which would be awesome. I guess I’ve just been on a roll, I hope it keeps going!

So, yeah, even if not all posts have the most incredible quality or have any coherence whatsoever, your blog is your blog, and you can do whatever you want with it, don’t worry too much!

This is day 89 of #100DaysToOffload

https://fosstodon.org/@joel/114758084741658291