I think Iām ready. Ready to start a blog, that is. A real actual blog. Iāve spent too much time of my life (a few years) telling myself and others, āOh, 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 isnāt an endeavor for money (though it could be eventually), and itās not for attention. Iām 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 Iām 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 peopleās 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 donāt want attention, Iād still like readership. Itās not like I want to start a blog that zero people care about. But Iām certainly not looking to bend to an advertiserās demands or garner some sort of internet celebrity-ship
Thank you for checking up on this and giving me motivation, especially after several months lol. Yeah Iāve 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 Iām not sure exactly how to start.
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 wonāt be either but thatās 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). Thatās 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 thatās 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 donāt 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).
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? Itās customizable enough without being overwhelming, and yeah they can look kinda samey but who cares? Give it a nice header image eventually and youāre good.
thatās the one I was running, maybe one day I will go back to it but itās a neat project anyway, and I had a lot of fun doing it.
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 itās in ownership limbo
Thereās a federated blogging platform named write.as that Iāve been interested in checking out, right up until my low self esteem comes back to smack me in the face.
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.
I guess itās not 1997 any more so you canāt just go to a page you likeās source and copy paste everything into a txt file and rename it .html and make that your webpage
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.
I just kinda said āfuck itā and wrote the introduction to my series, which will hopefully have its first entry by this Sunday. I decided Iām 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. Thatās a really good strategy. I should do it more often.
I am not an experienced writer so please be nice to me
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 theyāre doing, and there are fewer of them with a viable business model now that RSS has collapsed too
itās not 1997 anymore but itās not 2007 anymore either
I always sound like Iām going to bat for technical decisions made by Jeff Atwood when I say it but discourse is kind of a miracle in that itās modern open source web software that is extremely durable if you want to self host it
