I have been wanting to have my own blog for many years now and it has finally happened. But for some reason, it doesn't feel as exciting as I first thought, in fact it is a bit daunting to say the least.
Thankfully I am aware of the reasons why I feel this anxiety and I am going to address that today once and for all, so that I can referrence this article the next time I decide to leave something unpublished

And I know it sounds over dramatic given that I have almost no one reading but hear me out first...

Everytime I think of writing a new article

I have so many topics that I want to write about. Things that I learn and sometimes even topics I'm just partially exploring.
And it isn't a matter of not finding the time to write, but there are really many articles that I write but never publish.

I don't have a fixed way of making drafts for these articles. I sometimes write them down as markdown, or I open dev.to and then create drafts there but with every draft that never got published I would loose hope of ever publishing another article again

My initial desires of starting a blog

I have always been fascinated by reading blogs. But the one that really pushed me to build my own was Tania Rascia's blog . I don't read it that often anymore but I was really happy to revisit it today to still find that she still refers to her site as a digital garden. That is where I was first introduced to the concept.

If you google this term around a little, you will find it well described inside this article that summarizes what young, innocent me was expecting from this blog.

Around that time I got really interested in learning more about web security and this involved me reading through the blogs of many web researchers. I remember particularly stumbling into vickie li's blog

Although now it is on a dedicated domain; when I found it, it was hosted on github pages and had so much value to offer. This made me realise that I don't need fancy domain names or spend days on stylng to build my digital garden, all I needed was a place to publish my writing!

I wanted something similar to all these amazing blogs that I enjoyed reading.
A place to share what I learn, that would in turn incentivize me to keep learning new things.
A place on the internet I could call mine and share my thoughts. Thoughts that might help me find like minded people.

Too good to be true? I was too naive to realise this at the time.

How my expectations changed

As you can probably see, even my initial expectations were all over the place. On one hand I wanted my beautiful internet garden but I also wanted it to be a place with quality articles, like the ones that I enjoyed writing.

On top of all that, whenever I would google anything about making this a "better blog" most results were about improving content strategy and seo; terms that, I didn't realise soon enough, did not fit into my initial expectations with blogging.
But I went with the flow. Read articles about how to write articles that ranked well, how to do research for the articles that I would write.

And once I saw that this would require this much effort to just write an article, my gulible mind started to try to find ways of getting more then just the satisfaction of writing out of this.

So I started to read on ways to monetize and since then this seemed like a potential source of future side income. And this pipedream seemed so good in my head that I read even more on how to get that right too. Learnt more about social media and content marketting. Both on my own and my work time.

This got really stressful real soon

While doing all this research I forgot to do the one thing that was key to this whole plan. Writing!
But after creating the criteria's I wished my blogs should meet (based on my dumb reasearch) I had more articles as drafts than published.

With time I started reading more about other stuff too, got into rust and network programming and that was when I started reading really good writers that wrote very detailed blogs. Those absolutely blew mind.

Especially writers like fasterthanlime, Tim Perry, blogs from companies like cloudflare, discord, netflix, etc. And me, who still you see hasn't written much or at all, wanted to write articles that resembled their level of quality

I started expecting too much too early

This got to me at head many times, so much so that everytime I realised this was taking a toll on me, I would just end up googling - "does anyone just blog for fun".
These days when I do this, my own reddit question is part of the top search results which now I feel is the only thing I have to read through to get an assuring answer.

But once I had read this a few times, I realised I had to work on rethinking the expectations that I have with this blog. Hence this article!

Defining the right expectations with this blog

So as mentioned, this is meant to be my digital garden and I plan to treat it that way from now on.

I need this blog, because I love to write. It almost feels like a theraputic exercise to me at this point. Whenever I am in a confusing situation, I write about it to clear my head.

Yes it would be great if someone finds any of my writings useful.
And yes, it would be awesome if this would generate some income someday.
But that is not the point of this.\

But just decribing this "ideal" mindset into words has not helped me in the past. I still choke on when I decide whether or not a topic is worth writing, or more importantly, an article is worth publishing.

Defining what and how to write.

From now on, I'mm write anyhting that I like. It feels easy to say, but it's quite harder to internalise, atleast for me.

It's my blog, and even if the me being wrong or my opinions stemming from inexperience might invite some judgement to you as the reader, well I will now have a thick skin to that. But again, that is easier said than done.

This article very elegantly defines how to keep writing as a habit while not worrying about sounding too misleading and inviting judgement

I also would always pressure myself to re-reading every draft to the point of perfection. I used to rewrite almost every line so as to not leave in any unwanted words. Not anymore!

Paulgrahm wrote an excellent article describing that it is easier for both reader and writer to go through articles if they were written how the writer would normally talk to a friend. I plan on using this strategy

Conclusion

This is me talking to me - "Just share what you learn, write whatever you feel like, and PUBLISH. This is a place for you. Cherrish it!"

I remember reading somewhere that a writer should use less "I"s and more "you"s to signify that the article provides value to the reader. I never fully believed it but always had that at the back of my head whenever I was writing something I wanted to publish.
That might be true when you want to do great while marketting your "content", but I am just writing simple blogs here.\

Just sharing what I learn and how I learn it and all this is just for me, if you like it and find value, great! This beautiful article says it way better than I ever could.

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I will still repost the "worth-reading" articles to dev.to and most fun non-bloggy stuff on my twitter (with which I also initially made the same mistakes as this blog, now that too is just for fun)
And I also sometimes send out emails of summaries of articles I enjoyed reading. Most of them are technical. So if that sounds interesting, enter your email below and you will get the next one that I send out. You can read the previous emails here
Idk, I might create an RSS feed for this site someday in case someone's interested, but that is probably not gonna happen anytime soon.