šŸ¬ AVILEER'S VIRTUAL ZONE šŸ¬

#1

I think Iā€™m ready. Ready to start a blog, that is. A real actual blog. Iā€™ve spent too much time of my life (a few years) telling myself and others, ā€œOh, I should really start a blog. People undeniably care about what I have to say, and I feel like I have a pretty clear voice as a writer when I really put my mind to it.ā€

This isnā€™t an endeavor for money (though it could be eventually), and itā€™s not for attention. Iā€™m simply ready to put my feelings and opinions in a cohesive, readable format that anybody can look at and appreciate at their leisure. I guess the reason I made this thread is that Iā€™m lacking the drive and direction to kickstart myself.

To anybody with an active blog that accumulates an actual audience:
How did you start out? What do you write to keep peopleā€™s attention? What kind of platform do you use? Do you advertise? Or other general blogging questions that someone green to the medium might want answeredā€¦

Edit, I should specify: when I say I donā€™t want attention, Iā€™d still like readership. Itā€™s not like I want to start a blog that zero people care about. But Iā€™m certainly not looking to bend to an advertiserā€™s demands or garner some sort of internet celebrity-ship

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#2

I ran an unsuccessful blog where I played game boy games alphabetically. My advice: donā€™t do that

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#3

Well if you vaguely remember the time that I said I would write a thread about every portable pinball game, I was thinking along those lines lol

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#4

That sounds much more interesting And doable

#5

This just showed up in my recommended threads, and I was wondering if it ever amounted to anything? (I did see you posting a PokƩmon Pinball screenshot this week)

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#6

Thank you for checking up on this and giving me motivation, especially after several months lol. Yeah Iā€™ve been playing a ton of that game so am planning to write about it eventually. The idea of setting up a whole page for my blog is intimidating, though, and Iā€™m not sure exactly how to start.

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#7

The best way to start is to just start. When I was doing my blog (http://truedoommurderjunkies.blogspot.com/) I just threw together a page based off some templates and an image I got off google image search and then just started posting things.

I was never actually fully satisfied with the quality of my output and you likely wonā€™t be either but thatā€™s not something you should really worry about at first. The thing you want to focus on in the beginning is consistent output. I worked on a weekly schedule for a while there where no matter what once a week I posted something on my blog regardless.

Obviously I fell off and got busy with other things and am currently not posting anything anymore. When I do feel like starting again I might post less frequently like twice a month instead of once a week and spend more time beforehand coming up with things to say about interesting topics.

I had an idea for a post where I look at the bridges in GTA V and talk about how realistic or unrealistic they are based on how you would build a bridge in real life (I draw bridge plans for work so I think about bridges all day which is where this idea came from). Thatā€™s the kind of random weird thing people would want to read about right? Would the bridges in this game work in real life? And I would enjoy doing the research, taking screenshots, finding public standards and plans to compare the in-game bridges to and such, and packaging it all up into a topic that it would be worth the effort for me to put the work into it (whether I actually will is another matter).

But thatā€™s the overall approach I would take now if I were going to go back to my blog. Talk about stuff you like, games you like or donā€™t like, take something else you know and apply it to the games in some way. If I could come up with a dozen more ideas for topics like the bridge one I probably would start blogging more frequently again (time permitting).

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#8

Seconding Mr. Mechanical here: start a Blogger blog, pick a default template, and write one post.

THEN go back and make it look nicer.

Blogger pretty much rules? Itā€™s customizable enough without being overwhelming, and yeah they can look kinda samey but who cares? Give it a nice header image eventually and youā€™re good.

thatā€™s the one I was running, maybe one day I will go back to it but itā€™s a neat project anyway, and I had a lot of fun doing it.

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#9

Blogger feels like one of those things that Google could shut down at literally anytime now that blogs have been obsoleted by dumb shit like Medium and 30-part twitter threads

As much as I prefer it to free hosted WordPress blogs, it feels riskier in the same way that Tumblr is now that itā€™s in ownership limbo

#10

lean into the ephemeral nature

piss into the wind

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#11

Thereā€™s a federated blogging platform named write.as that Iā€™ve been interested in checking out, right up until my low self esteem comes back to smack me in the face.

#12

i set up a website so you should absolutely do it. its absolutely worth getting your thoughts up in a concrete public space and its helped so much organize thoughts + feelings on things.

#13

Is there any reason other than lack of technical know-how that you wouldnā€™t just pay $30 for a domain name or whatever and run your own damn place

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#14

I lack technical know-how and dollars

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#15

I too lack technical know-how, I was just asking.

I guess itā€™s not 1997 any more so you canā€™t just go to a page you likeā€™s source and copy paste everything into a txt file and rename it .html and make that your webpage

#16

I mean you probably can. You can definitely get a cheap domain and make a really simple html page. I kind of want to now, just need to brush up on my html.

#17

Iā€™m leaning heavily towards blogger, considering my favorite blogs are on that platform.

#18

:drudgesiren: https://avileer.blogspot.com/ :drudgesiren:

NEW BLOG ALERT

I just kinda said ā€œfuck itā€ and wrote the introduction to my series, which will hopefully have its first entry by this Sunday. I decided Iā€™m going to use the blog for general entries about games and stuff, and have this be a specific series, rather than dedicate the entire blog to it

thanks to everyone who encouraged me to just throw shit to the wall and fix it later. Thatā€™s a really good strategy. I should do it more often.

I am not an experienced writer so please be nice to me

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#19

nice, this is gonna be a good series

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#20

also the technical environment has changed a lot ā€“ WordPress is kind of grotty codewise and constantly hacked, so you better have your php deployment handled by someone who knows what theyā€™re doing, and there are fewer of them with a viable business model now that RSS has collapsed too

itā€™s not 1997 anymore but itā€™s not 2007 anymore either

I always sound like Iā€™m going to bat for technical decisions made by Jeff Atwood when I say it but discourse is kind of a miracle in that itā€™s modern open source web software that is extremely durable if you want to self host it

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