State of the Blog

In February of 2019, I made some major changes to this blog. I chose a new static site generator to build the site with, and I also changed where I hosted it. At the time I was very excited, as I believed these changes would make it easier for me to publish content, and that this in turn would motivate me to post more. The blog had gone into dire straits at the time - my post count was sporadic in 2017, and I didn’t post a single thing to it in 2018¹. Of all my personal flaws, my inability to consistently blog has been one of the most frustrating for me to accept, and to fix (which is not the same as saying I think it is my worst flaw. It’s not - it’s just been one of the most annoying).

It’s been 17 months since I made that migration, and I thought it was time to do a “State of the Blog” post to see whether these changes helped as much as I hoped they would.

First off, here are some light statistics:

• From February 6th, 2019 - present, I wrote 88 posts.
  • This averages out to about 5 posts per month.
• From February 2019 - June 2020, there were only two months in which I wrote no blog posts: April 2019 (not sure what happened this month), and May 2020 (when the COVID-19 pandemic left me feeling really out of it)

Looking back at the full history of this blog, I can say that this is the most consistent I have ever been in posting content. Throughout 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 there were gaps of four, five, or even six months in which I posted nothing. The fact that I posted in 15 out of the last 17 months - and that I posted enough content in those other months to more than make up for the two dry spells - tells me that the site migration actually worked. I cannot accurately express how truly happy this makes me.

With that being said, there are still some outstanding issues I would eventually like to fix.

Site Design

I’m happy with the site’s overall design. I like clean, simple styling that focuses on the content. However, if I had a professional web designer in my ear, I am sure they would suggest all sorts of changes I could make to improve the blog’s look and readability. For instance, they would probably tell me to change the site width, the font size, and maybe even the font itself.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a professional designer in my ear, so I don’t know what specifically these changes would be. I have tried doing some research into web site design, but in doing so I learned to appreciate that it is a complicated topic and art unto itself. It’s not something that a software developer like me can just slide into after reading a few tutorials. If I wanted to make the site better, I need to take some actual training.

Similarly, I know that there are aspects of the site’s current styling that bother me. For instance, the size of the text on the front page differs from the size of the same text on the individual pages. The size of the post titles is also much too small. I’ve actually tried to fix these issues (among others), but I found that a lot of my fixes ended up introducing other problems, so for now I’m leaving everything as is. Sooner or later I need to take some actual training in how to use CSS, so that I can finally use it to do what I want, rather than just tweaking styles in ways I don’t understand until I (hopefully) get them to look close enough.

Content

I want to do a better job with the variety of content on the site. There are times where it looks like the only thing I’m interested in writing about is model kits. This is not at all my intent. My purpose with this blog is to make it a place where I can write about all my interests, including video games, programming, Disney, music, and yes, model kits.

For whatever reason, however, I find model kits to be the easiest thing to write about, which has forced me to do some soul searching to determine why I find putting down my thoughts about everything else is such a struggle.

In the case of music, I feel as if I do not have the right vocabulary with which to express how I feel about the music I like. I fear anything I put together is going to devolve into cliche, lacking any analysis of tempo, key changes, etc. If I had to choose between writing nothing about music, and writing something that reads like a user review on Amazon.com - where bored dads describe any song with a lot of instruments playing at once as a “kaleidoscope of sound” - I would choose to write nothing. Which, to be fair, is exactly what I am doing.

In regards to Disney, I feel that I know more about the company, its films, its parks, and its history than anyone in my social circles. Yet compared to some of the fans you encounter online, I look like a newbie at best. Anything I could possibly write in relation to Disney has probably been said - and said better - by someone already.

When it comes to programming topics, my interest in writing correlates directly to how much, and what kind of programming I am doing at any given time. If I’m working with a lot of boring, well-worn tech, I find that I don’t have much to say. Recently I have had a different problem - I haven’t done actual programming on a daily basis in quite some time, as my job has involved more and more managerial tasks. My knowledge about many topics has thus become, old, outdated, and rusty. I don’t feel confident enough to talk about them with any degree of expertise, and so I do not dare to².

The silver lining here is that I now know that if I can somehow find a way to consistently work on interesting programming projects, the blog content will come about naturally. For example, back in April I wrote four blog posts discussing the quality of training and reference materials for programmers. This was when I was stuck at home under quarantine, and had the privilege of doing some training in programming topics I was extremely interested in. It was the first programming material on the blog since way back in 2017, which was the last time that I can remember having programming topics that I was extremely interested in. I know how to get the “writing juices” flowing, so to speak. I just have to figure out how to keep them flowing.

The situation regarding video game content is by far the most complicated. There was once a time where video games were the only thing I wanted to write about; I even used to write for a small video game review site in college. Yet until this year, gaming related posts made up a tiny fraction of this blog’s content - so what happened?

If you want to get technical, I never actually stopped writing about gaming. I wrote dozens and dozens of game reviews and essays over the years, all of which currently exist as rough drafts that I never got around to finishing. To be honest, this has frustrated me more than if I never wrote anything to begin with. Every year in which I continued writing unfinished drafts was another year in which I failed to understand what was holding me back, keeping me from making this content public.

Some time last year I identified what I think to be the root problem. Basically, I have spent so much time over the years reading stupid, ignorant, lazy, bad faith discussions about video games that my brain has been rewired, as if trained by a neural network. Any time I write something about gaming, my mind comes up with its own virtual comments section filled with trolls poking holes in everything I’m saying.

Once I identified the problem, I was able to figure out some strategies to get these internal strawmen to quiet down, and I think it is finally working. This spring I wrote a number of pieces about the Nintendo Switch, and just this week I published eleven posts about the Mega Man series, including a multi-post, deep dive analysis of a single game. I have been trying to write one of these deep dives for the longest time, but this is the first one to get out the door. My hope is that this will generate some momentum that I can use to get the others completed.

Quality Control

I need to do a better job at re-reading my stuff before I post it. When I don’t, I wind up with typos and terrible sentence structures that linger on - at least until I discover them, at which point I get frustrated and go on a tear in which I revise and edit old posts. This often distracts me from the new content I set out to write, and it usually puts me in a foul, self-critical mood that runs the risk of sapping me of motivation to continue working on the site.

I managed to re-read and revise all of the Mega Man posts from this week, and I was very happy with the results. Perhaps I will read them again six months from now, to see if there is anything in there I missed.

Conclusion

I conclude that here, in 2020, the state of the blog is better than it has ever been. The content is flowing, I am feeling engaged, and most importantly, I am finally getting comfortable with the stuff I am putting out. I can only hope it gets even better over the next 17 months.