Via: XKCD
It was a year ago tomorrow that I wrote the first of what would become what I would consider a ‘daily’ post on the blog. Sure, it existed before that and I averaged about one post a week (although sometimes less) but on this day last year (April 1st), Gilligan over on the Retrospace blog posted some advice to bloggers. After I read that, I made up my mind that I needed to put in much more of an effort.
Before I knew it, a whole year had passed and here I am writing about it. I honestly didn’t think I had it in me to sustain a blog every day for an entire month let alone a year. Funnily enough, I’ve never run out of things to write about and I’ve barely repeated myself at all.
Yet it’s funny to look back and see that I’ve come a very long way with my blogging. I dare say my writing has improved, what I write about has become slightly more nuanced than simple reviews and my commentary has become more vocal instead of simply relaying the news.
All of this I still enjoy very much. Even though I normally have a gym session under me before I sit down at 6am to write the day’s post, I don’t feel any overbearing obligation when doing so. Oh, sure there are some days when inspiration can be a bit hard to come by, but those are relatively few and far between and I always resolve them in the end.
Why mention all of this? The answer is simple, you CAN do it too.
There are tons of people out there who have a blog (or tumblelog, twitter, etc.) and update it every now and again. For some of them, I am forever grateful for the invention of RSS, because without it, their blogs wouldn’t be getting a peep of a visit from me. I simply don’t have the time to check back and see if they’ve written something new or not.
I think the main reason is that you do have to schedule time for your blog, otherwise its just not going to work. I do it in the morning before work, perhaps you can do it before you go to bed. Either way, if you don’t specify a time to work on it, it’ll never get done.
For animation types, I simply cannot fathom why some of them don’t update at least once a day or at the bare minimum, once a week. As creative types, a blog can serve as a great output for your work, inspirations or even your non-animation hobbies.
Besides all that, blogs are stupidly easy to set up and maintain. This blog began on Blogger before it moved to WordPress.com (where it went daily) and before it moved to it’s own host using WordPress.org. Along the way, I’ve garnered some experience that continues to serve me well.
My point is that only you can make your blog the best it can be, no-one else will or want to. Put in the effort and you’ll be surprised what you get out of it. I sure am.