Please write

In case anyone needs to hear this.

Do you ever find yourself writing braindumps on cool stuff you find, out to your friends on Discord, Telegram, Bluesky, Mastodon, or any other social media?

If so, I think you should consider starting up a blog.

I guarantee you that if you can find a cool thing to narrate about on Discord, you can certainly write a blog post. Copy the messages into a text file, and start refining them into sentences. Start elaborating on contextual details you may have omitted.

Within an evening, you will have a piece of text ready to be published.

Don’t worry about the details

Think your writing will not be polished enough? The thing is, it really doesn’t have to be.

Have a look at how rough my writing was back when I was starting out and still figuring out the right form factor for my posts. Point is, it’s not going to be perfect in the beginning.

It’s fine if your style is rough and unpolished. It is your style, and you should cherish it, work on it, polish it with time. Grand things aren’t built in a day.

The good thing about a blog compared to social media, is that you won’t get unsolicited comments if you don’t ask for them. You can omit having a comment section. You can ask your friends not to criticise your post. You can also omit sharing your contact details—though you probably shouldn’t, because from my experience, people reading blogs tend to be very kind!

If you enjoy sharing braindump threads with friends, and they enjoy reading them, interacting with them—blog posts are a great way to organise those braindumps into something more coherent, more worthy of a conversation.

So, don’t worry about those details.

Write.

Seriously, don’t worry about the details

Stuck on the “I want to blog, but I don’t have a cool personal website” phase?

Make a folder with a bunch of HTML files, with some ugly CSS to accompany it. There really is no need to overthink it in the beginning.

Just as your blog doesn’t have to read polished initially, it also doesn’t have to look polished. You can revise it as you go—as you notice little details going awry, bits and pieces you can tweak to make it look better.

I went through lots of revisions until my website reached its current state, where I’m actually really satisfied with the typography, layout, colour scheme, and general vibe. That stuff takes experience, trial and error, and you aren’t going to get it perfect the first time around.

So, don’t worry about those details.

Write!

Hit that Enter key

Got a something of a blog post, but scared it’s not up to your standards to publish it?

Hit that Enter key.
Share your post with some friends.
You won’t regret it!

So… please, write!

Stop reading this

Stop reading this. Read your last Discord braindump again, filter out the good parts, and try to write a post about it!

No, seriously stop. I’m getting kind of embarrassed =w=

…But I’ll still hit that Enter key!