Rebooting the blog

After several months, even years of not writing a post, I am back and motivated to blog again – and more.

My history of blogging

When I started blogging in 2015, I adopted a regular schedule of one post per week. During the first two months and a half, I even posted twice a week, because an almost empty blog felt awkward. When I went on vacations, I would write blog posts in advance and schedule them for publication during the vacations to not skip a week or two.

I maintained the pace for quite a while, but after several months, the motivation started to dwindle. It also got harder to come up with new topics. The backlog I had accumulated from things that happened at work was empty.

In 2017, I started skipping a week, sometimes more, even though I had started to take on guest posts. Sometimes I would find enough to write about for a few weeks in a row, sometimes there would be only one post in a month.

In 2019, posting has been completely irregular, and by the end of the year, I published my last post before today. (There has been one guest post early this year, but that doesn’t count).

Motivation

What had happened? Blogging had started as a fun project and had been a kind of habit at first. It was rewarding (and still is) to see that people were able to learn from what I was writing.

However, the lack of inspiration for new topics made that it felt more and more like tedious work. Work I did not get paid for. I could have monetized the blog but that would have spoiled the fun for me completely. So, once I had dropped the habit of regular writing, it did not come back. I guess that’s how habits work.

Rebooting

In the past weeks, I have felt more and more motivated to go back to tinker with C++ and programming in general outside of work again. And I feel a rising motivation to blog about things. And I can tell you, it feels good!

However, things will be different. I definitely will not go back to the one-post-per-week pace of 2015, because I don’t think I can maintain it. I don’t even know whether posts will be on a regular schedule like once in a month or so.

There also may be content that differs from the way I have blogged before. I am rebooting the pet project I started almost 5 years ago. I am thinking about writing a development diary or recording or streaming live coding videos.

Here’s a thread with a series of Twitter polls where you can help me decide:

Conclusion

So, I am rebooting both my blog and the project I started to get ideas for posts. How long will it last? I don’t know, I am as curious as you are. Probably more.

If you have a great source of motivation and inspiration for me, please drop me a line. If you haven’t, you’re still welcome to leave a comment!

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7 Comments


  1. This is welcome news, indeed! Looking forward to your new content, Arne!

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  2. I’m happy to hear this, I’ve enjoyed your past posts a lot, and returned to some repeatedly for reference. Like others, I don’t think worrying about a specific frequency of new posts is important at all. Better to write/publish when you have something interesting. I imagine many of us are using RSS and similar tools, so we’ll see new posts as they appear anyway.

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  3. My biggest source of inspiration is Twitter, plus maybe some Slack/Discord channels about programming. If you follow the right ones, among all the noise there you can find many little inspirations like links, topics., thoughts – quicker that when reading lengthy articles or books about a single topic.

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  4. My advice: only write a blog post when you feel like you have good topic and you feel like writing it up. Don’t try to force yourself to stick to a predefined weekly schedule or so. As you have mentioned and experienced, motivation will decrease and that will most likely also have an influence on the quality of the blog posts.

    Don’t just blog for blogging, blog because you have something interesting to share!

    Reply

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