For the past few weeks I’ve been taking an email course by John Somez on blogging and it has been a great way to refocus on the possible content for this site. One of the first suggestions I ever heard about learning how to program was that I should blog as much as possible, but I kept struggling with deciding what I should write about and being consistent with it.
Choosing a theme
When I started exploring web development and programming, there were so many choices and possible paths that I became hesitant and afraid to make the wrong decision. I tried a little bit of everything because of that fear. I would try all the beginner courses on Treehouse covering JavaScript, Python, PHP, and Ruby when I should have stuck with one. Choosing a theme reminded me of that indecisiveness. It eventually came down to writing about something I’m familiar with (Ruby on Rails) or something that I need to learn more about (JavaScript frameworks). I eventually decided to write about Ruby because its the topic I’m most confident in and a language I really enjoy using. I also believe that there is a big jump between introductory tutorials on Rails and intermediate level stuff that I could help fill with my blog posts. If I’m able to, I want to incorporate a magic theme because I always hear about the magic that goes in the background of a Rails application. One of my favorite Ruby books, called Metaprogramming Ruby 2, had a section called spell book that prompted me to record and study design patterns or quirky Ruby behavior in notebooks as if I was writing my own Ruby spellbooks. While learning on my own, little motivations like that can sometimes help the most and it’s a fun way to think about programming.
Creating the blog
I had already created this blog by forking a pre-made jekyll repo, following its instructions and reading an article on setting it up. I was able to host it on my account’s github page and the repo itself included plugins for disqus and most common social media accounts. I read a blog post about the advantages of a static site generators and since jekyll was written in Ruby, I was more inclined to use it as a blogging platform instead of Wordpress. I’m aiming to improve the styling for this blog in the future or even migrate it to a Middleman project since that one more closely resembles a Rails app.
Blog post ideas
When I was struggling to come up with blog post ideas before this course, I don’t know why I didn’t think of sitting down and brainstorming 30 to 50 ideas at once. It seems obvious now and I can definitely see it helping in a lot of ways. I can start writing drafts days before I need to publish them or even create drafts for other posts. This will enable me to check my work and add more relevant details that come up after multiple proofreadings. This reduces the fear I have with putting my writing out there and would encourage more creative ideas. Also, I came up with a lot of things I wish I knew when I started and those are the blog posts I want to write first.
Consistency
Consistency might be the most difficult part of writing a blog. Staying consistent and forming good habits is very important because if I can’t be disciplined enough to write regularly, why should the readers care about following my posts? I want to publish as much as I can to show and share how much I’ve learned, become better as a writer, and get called out if I don’t fully understand what I’m talking about. In a way, writing without comments or feedback is like coding without tests, you won’t really know if what you’re doing is wrong until a bigger problem occurs down the road.
Web traffic
This is another tough one. There are so many blogs out there and standing out will take a lot of time and effort. It involves following other people’s blogs, commenting with relevant information, and providing value in some way. I’m still figuring out how to engage with the comments section for blogs that I follow and trusting myself enough to voice an opinion, but everything is always a work in progress. Writing more blog posts would probably help in that department too.