i started setting up a blog on my personal site— i want to move more off social media (and more of my time off the internet, generally), especially now that being off of twitter has slowly weaned me off some of the more… let’s say addictive qualities of the platforms. i think rss feeds give me personally more a feeling of control over when i actually want to view things, so that’s what i’m aiming for.
weirdly enough tho, it’s way harder for me mentally to post there, bc it feels like it should be more important or something, which is silly. i wonder if part of it is that i (currently) can’t really post off the cuff on it, or if theres something about the way i know social media will just move past my post if ppl want to ignore it. i don’t really have a “thing” to blog about, obviously, since if you follow this you’re aware it’s mostly stream of consciousness or memes or whatever. idk! i’m interested to see how i can get past that.
Alright so all three of those Gifs basically some up my immediate thoughts, but also CONGRATS for getting your website setup for posts! I agree with pretty much everything you said in your post - having a personal site to post things is great because it reduces the need for social media, however figuring out what to post can be so...hard. I find though just keeping with it (doesn't need to be daily though like the gif lmao) you eventually find more and more you're comfortable with posting. The weirdest thing for me is the fact whatever I post is just... open to the wide internet? Whereas Facebook or whatever I can restrict who can see my content. I've sort of gotten over that, but it's still something I think about when I make the posts.
I sort of view it as the same as Journaling. It becomes easier the more you stick with it. When I first started (and what sort of kept me from starting for the longest time) was the fact I was thinking "oh, but what am I even going to write about? I have nothing important to say?". But then after sticking with it, there's been plenty of times I've been glad to have somewhere to put my thoughts on the day. A lot of days are still basically just "Woke up, went to work, came home" without much more detail, but that's okay. The app I use (daylio) makes it easy to look back at stats/ entries so I enjoy it to see progress or trends or see how often I've done an activity. There's also part of me that likes to imagine it's sort of a history preservation thing. Like, what if in the future historians have a hard time knowing what living in this time period was like? They have my journal to see! Sort of like The third shaker
Stranger still, Bryson reveals that there used to be three shakers at the dining table as recently as the 19th century. Historians have no idea what went inside the third shaker. Maybe powdered mustard? Whatever it was, it got demoted. (You thought the third wheel had it rough.)
It's also okay for the site to grow and evolve. On My website for example, the categories have changed a lot. Outdoors, Life, and Books were either changed or removed for a bit only to be readded as I had more I wanted to talk about. The nicest thing for me about the site is having something I can refer back to or send to friends if there's something I want to share with a lot of people.
The last thing I wanted to mention though - you brought up a feeling of feeling like you can't post off the cuff to your website, the way you could twitter (or, I read it as the sort of short posts something like tweeting). One thing that might help is maybe make a spot on your website for short quips? Then you can be like "ah yes, this is the spot I've made for them". It's still a bit more of a pain than just twitter of course because HTML and CSS. But maybe can get over the mental block?
Anyways, didn't think this would get so long but congrats on making a website!
Edit: I took a look at your RSS feed. I've never heard of HTML Journal before, but seems like a cool thing to use! I just wanted to say if you end up wanting to host your own RSS feeds, they're not that hard to setup, and I don't mind trying to explain how if you need help! Also completely fine if not though.
