Learning How to Blog

I find the actual technical side of creating a blog so much more fun than the actual writing side. It’s weird!

I could spend countless hours trying to fitz around with CSS or adjusting some JavaScript to do something like add little fancy spinning buttons that link to somewhere else on the internet.

What I seem to struggle with is the writing bit. Why is this? All I need to do is to get my thoughts down, but when I try it feels like nothing comes to me to write about. Sure, I’ve done lots of cool and interesting things but surely no one would want to read about those. I overthink writing way too much and that turns into not writing anything at all.

So how can I solve this? I’m not sure. First I’m going to try to remove the barriers that made it more difficult to write for me before: I had a Jekyll powered website and while everything was in a Markdown file in GitHub it was a bit of a pain to actually write out something because I’d be really picky about the images not looking quite right or the design looking a bit off.

I’m going to start with micro blogs, inspired by micro.blog, to capture my small ‘writings/posts/jots’ of writing and mix that in with a bit more of long-form writing.

I’ll pin the long-form stuff so that it’s a bit more visible and I can show it off. I’ll try to make it frictionless to write more, even in tiny small amounts, and then I’ll try to read up on how other people have done it. I can’t be the only one facing this problem: how do I even get started with writing content for a blog? Many people have been here before, and persevered, so I can do it too.

Before I made this post, I read: “How to blog about code and give zero fucks”

Which brings me to the subject of this post, which is that you, developer in an underrepresented group who hopefully received this link somehow through the magical machinations of social media, should be blogging more. I need you to blog more. Little future developers who look or act or dress or think like you need you to blog more. Your slightly confused and defensive developer community needs you to blog more. Please please please please. And if you are like, “I give zero fucks about what those people need, I need to get off work at six and build charming birdhouses or customize my bicycle or something,” the best part is giving zero fucks is totally fine.

I can do it! You can too.

Now here’s where I open it up: do you have any resources to share on how you have gotten started with blogging? Specifically how do you actually get words down? I’d be interested in hearing from others, so please share anything you might think could be helpful. 😊