What a surprise - the start of a new year, and a post about needing to post more. But this time, I do feel the need to stick with it more, for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, with 3 children under the age of 3 I have every excuse to not be posting very often. The amount of time I get to spend with them while I'm working from home is fantastic, but it can become all consuming. However, Claudia and I have had a lot of conversations lately where we try to recall some of the specifics of Evie's development milestones compared to the twins and we're already hazy on the details. If I can't remember these kinds of details after 2 years, what chance will I have after 10 (or 20!) years?
Secondly, I've been making a conscious effort over the last few months to read blogs from the 'indieweb'. This began as professional curiosity, since I started out as a web developer and still see myself as one, even though I haven't coded professionally like that for about 15 years. I kept reading because the posts are interesting (to me at least), and cover a range of topics from professional to personal to short scribbles and comments on other people's posts.
The thing that really stuck out to me over the last couple of weeks though - as people posted their 'year in review' posts, they linked back to previous years and some people had history on their sites reaching back 10 or 20 years. It was a powerful reminder of how useful posting regularly can be.
Similarly, this part of Rach Smith's re-entry to blogging really stuck with me:
I don’t want to look back on my life in 5 years and find the only things I have to show for my time are 5,000 changed nappies and 30,000 lines of code. I want a record of what I’m thinking and feeling.
So, how do I plan on sticking with it this time? This post from Mattias Ott (via Chris Coyier) sums it up quite neatly:
Here is a thought. Maybe, we are overthinking it. Maybe, the one thing we should care most about is just putting stuff out there. At least, this is the primary reason we have a personal website, right? We have it to document and share random thoughts, things we learned, and nuggets we found. If we don’t put stuff out there, why have a website in the first place?
I know I'm definitely guilty of overthinking blog posts - I'm doing it right now, already up to 450 words for a post that could be summed up as 'just post shorter stuff, and do it more often'. So that's what I will be doing - instead of huge posts attempting to summarise big life events or trips, I'll be trying to do shorter posts as things happen instead. That doesn't mean that there won't be big blog posts (in fact, I want to do a series of articles about Domain Driven Design in PHP at some point this year), but I'm going to be making a conscious effort to not make these the only type of post.
There may also be more posts where I just link to other people's content that I find interesting (a la Jeremy Keith's 'links' section of his site).
The other thing I want to do is to re-platform the blog (again). I've already written about how I've become disillusioned with the direction of Ghost, and I think part of the friction is writing for a site that doesn't 'feel' like mine at the moment. So I'm going to shift back to something that's a bit less opinionated, and a bit easier to tinker with (looking at you, Kirby). I'd also like to make my own design this time around, just to really put my stamp on things. It also gives me a chance to move the design away from the travel-diary focus that it's had since the blog originally started in 2011.
So, posting more things, more often, with less polish. Simple right? Let's see where we are this time next year. In any case, hitting publish in 3... 2... 1...
Yours etc,
Patto
P.S. As part of the 'more things, more often', some of these posts will be about the kids and may be password protected for friends and family only.