I don’t think I can be a content creator

Today is 31st May, the end of #WeblogPoMo24, and I managed to write an article for every day of the month, except for the 1st, because I learned about the whole hashtag thingy on the 2nd. Some days it was late, like today, other days I wrote the articles in the morning and scheduled them for 6pm local UK time to be published, and a very few were actually written a day before.

But none of them, and I mean zero, were scheduled more than a day ahead. So this is where I need to look into the mirror, high five myself for having done it, and decide never to do it again.

Writing an article a day is hard! It doesn’t make me feel good. About 10 minutes ago I was still a ball of stress because it’s almost 10pm here, I’ve not written my daily blogpost, I’m going to fail the effort, what the hell am I supposed to even write about!? And then I thought: why not just write about all of these thoughts? And thus you’re reading the end result of it.

Then there’s also the thematic issue: some of my articles were technical, others were rants, some were still business focused, but not development, there was one about photography, and all of these are endearing — or I’d like to think so, — but I feel like if I am going to have a blog, it should at least not confuse the people reading it. That, to me, means at least keeping some sort of thematic consistency, which I’ve most definitely not done here. It’s all good, because the whole point of #WeblogPoMo24 is to just write whatever comes to your mind. The focus is on the act of writing and hitting the publish button, not on creating an elaborate content strategy.

Maybe I should start recycling old content. That feels disingenuous to me. Or maybe I should repeat some stuff that I now look at as super basic, because I can’t know where the person reading my blog is in their tech career journey, but then I have a problem of who my audience is.

Then I’m thinking about writing content so that I can use it as a sales funnel of sorts, or at least a way to build trust, so when someone’s evaluating whether to award me a contract or not, they come to the blog, read a bunch of articles, and conclude that I know what the heck I’m doing and sign the dotted line.

But most importantly, I don’t want to take out an hour each day to sit down, think of a topic and slog through actually writing it. I suffer, the article suffers, and as a consequence you suffer. Not actively, but questions about why you read that are entirely valid.

I did like that I was able to actually churn out (word usage on purpose here) these articles, because it taught me that I do actually have the discipline when I want to have it. I liked the consistency, I liked the routine of it, and I liked the pings when bots picked up the articles based on the rss feed in two different communities.

I’m going to scale it back to a bi-weekly, as in twice every week, article schedule. I have a lot of things to say, but not every-day amounts. I’ll do Tuesdays and Fridays. Let’s see how that goes!

It’s been a fun experiment!