I will send this blog post to a few friends of mine. I might scare them away from writing a blog, but my challenge here is to not let that happen.
So firstly, instead of pointing you my very badly articulated blog post of mine that explains why my blog is called a weblog, I give you a tldr.
When I tell you to write a blog, I don't want you to tell you to write the kind of blogs people write these days. I want you to write the kind of personal blogs that people used to write a decade or two earlier, and back then it was called weblog (which later got later shortened to blog) meaning a log on the web. Very few people write that kinds of blogs these days, but as they say:
0.01% of people is a lot of people
— Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) February 12, 2021
I was about to go to a tangent, but let me come back. So... as I note in my badly articulated blog post, this is what a weblog is:-
- Weblog is a personal project.
- It is mostly a log of observations, thoughts, ideas, and/or activities of the person.
- The weblog is primarily intended for a very limited audience [or you should entirely ignore who's going to read it and that would be a very reasonable thing].
~ Tamseel in a very condescending tone
This is a very meh definition. So you should probably not delve very much on that.
However, I will point you to read something from some essays by Henrik Karlsson (whom you might have heard a many times from me).
He has this essay/blogpost titled "Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog" which is a simple bullet list of points. Interestingly, the most interesting point is at the end:-
In real life, you can’t go on and on about your obsessions; you have to tame yourself to not ruin the day for others. This is a good thing. Otherwise, we’d be ripping each other's arms off like chimpanzees. But a blog is a tiny internet house where you decide the norms. And since there are already countless places where you can't be yourself, there is no need to build another one of those. The law of the land is that everything you think is funny is funny. Those who find the texture of your mind boring or offensive can close the tab, no need to worry about them. It is good for the soul to have a place where being just the way you are is normal. And it is a service to others, too. You'll be surprised how many people are laughably similar to you and who wish there was a place where they felt normal. You can build that.
In another point:
Not that many people will care about what you write, at least for the first few years, so make the writing useful to you. Write in a way that lets you refine your thoughts about the things that matter. Write to experience what you care about in higher resolution, write to enhance your feeling of aliveness.
Also:-
Your contradictions are an asset. You’re a lover of classical English architecture and you’re also a dirty little punk—expressing both at the same time is more interesting than sharing just cute pictures of English gardens or just wild trashy stuff. The more you incorporate everything that you love and that comes easily for you, your interests, your sense of humor, your grammatical tics, etc, the more your style emerges.
He also has another interesting and rather longer essay titled "A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox" which you can read sometime else because reading it now can possibly overwhelm you which is against our purpose [or maybe you can also read now; the point is, follow whatever trails that seem interesting]. But I'll leave an excerpt.
People feeling alone in their interests has always been true to a certain extent, but the internet has made it much worse. The excess of information allows you to travel down your path of interest with mad velocity. On the internet, Wonderland is recursive, with rabbit holes opening up to yet more rabbit holes; you never stop falling. And the further you fall, the less likely it is that anyone you’ve ever met is falling where you are. This will make you immensely sad. You will visit your parents, and when they ask you about your life you will have two choices. You can either be incomprehensible and see them grow concerned about things you are excited about, or you can talk about surface-level things and cry a little when you are alone at night.The reason I’m spelling out this dynamic is twofold. First, you can get out of this mess if you want to. You do that by writing online (or publishing cool pieces of software, or videos, or whatever makes you tickle—as long as you work in public). Second, if you want to get out of the mess the key lies exactly in understanding that you are not the only person who has no one to talk to about the things you get obsessed by.
This essay resonated with me a lot, and since the time I read that, I think have gotten out of that mess.
I just now went away started re-reading some of interesting Henrik essays. I want to point out some of them here, but I won't because I might write a separate post where I share some of the most interesting essays of him. And the reason I'm telling you this here is because if I don't write that I'd like you to nudge me to do so. The way you can nudge me is by writing to me, and that is what I'll discuss in my next post.
Anyways, back to writing a blog. If, by any chance, you have actually decided to give it a go, I'll help you with the undecidedness about where exactly to write. For now, you have only two options:-
- Choose the simpler path, and make a blog using the same platform I use for my blog at the time i.e. Blogger.
- Go be nerdy about all kinds of blogging platforms, and list down all their pros and cons and then eventually reach the same conclusion as mine. Hehe. Bye!
Being able to spin up a room of your own with a few clicks is one of the great advantages we have over previous generations. Make use of it. ~Henrik