Some aspects of creating a blog are really easy, and some are extremely difficult!

After a very interesting discussion in the Astro Discord — started by none other than core maintainer Alex himself (btw congratulations on this recent achievement 🎉) —, I joked around that someone could write a blog about reasons why it is so difficult for many people to not only write, but also maintain a blog as a whole.

The man who nominated me as an Astro Support Squad — Jacob (btw thank you very much for noticing me within this awesome community 😍) — took that quite literally and wrote a blog about it. No joke. Check it out: https://jacobjenkins.codes/posts/why-is-writing-blogs-so-hard/ This is his very first blog btw (and hopefully not his last one, as I really enjoyed reading his style).

Our beloved everywhere-helper, Blogger, Designer and StudioCMSer — Lou (btw thank you for giving me some blog writing tips in advance so I can more confidently write this 🤩) — jumped immediately on this awesome hype-train (as Twitch users might call it) and published his follow-up post within fricking 12 hours!!! Believe me, I checked the commits, Lou literally pushed within 4min of the 12h mark.

As I will include many references to both of their blogs, it's best if you read theirs first. And then mine. Or maybe it's better if you just read theirs, I'm not yet sure how mine will develop.

But what I can say write, is that mine will fully focus on just the writing skills.

How to setup a blog (technical challenges)

Whilst this blog doesn't focus on how to build a blog, deploy it and all this technical stuff, I want to mention that everyone can do it. Like Lou mentioned, as a non-technical person, you can always just create an account on Medium, Leaflet, Pckt, Offprint and other alternatives. If you are a little into programming, you can let your creativity a little bit more space and thanks to the awesome Starlight Blog project from HiDeoo you do not need much knowledge to deploy your own website. Nowadays, where there are also PaaS (Platform as a Service) providers like Netlify, which make deploying stuff a Click-Ops adventure, there no more is any excuse in not being able to publish your blog because of technical difficulties.

Okay, jokes aside, now: Writing skills

But this blog should focus on mainly on the "Writing Skill" as I said, so let's continue there. As I myself initially had a hard time writing blogs, I can totally agree with Jacob that getting started is hard. It's not like reading through the Astro "Getting started" guide where you just have to follow the instructions and then ask on Discord what a InvalidContentEntryDataError means — please use the #support thread if you do 🫶 — (If you are still wondering what this error means, click here).

On the other hand, the goal seems so close and doable. Just write some words. What's so hard in writing those fricking words? Actually, I myself don't know. Why are you asking me? The only thing that helped me getting out of the spiral of "You-Want-To-Write-But-Every-Time-You-Stare-At-The-Blinking-Cursor-Your-Brain-Goes-Numb" (let's make that the hashtag of the week) was Lou's tip of not wanting as much of yourself in your first blog. Why do you want a perfect blog to start with? Just because of your reputation? So people don't think wrong of you? Feel disappointed? To be honest: That's bullshit! Not just because your first blog will very likely not be read by anyone (with the exception of Jacob's exceptional blog), but also because you are just making it harder for yourself. My personal mind ceiling was that I thought I must write at least 500 words to begin with. But who says that? To be honest, if I could look back, I sometimes think: "Man, it would have been so unique and cool if my first ever blog was just like a regular tweet", or even extremer: One. Word. Nobody will stop you from publishing this blog:

Hello 👋

(Sorry if I now took your awesome idea,
and included your whole blog post in here

— wow cool, that rhymes)

See? I can do whatever I want, even being a fricking poet (typical German behaviour), and nobody will judge me. Okay, maybe someone will hate on this blog because it's "a waste of time, no meaning in all this useless content", but who _c a r e s_? It's your blog, nobody asked for their opinions (unless you have a comment section under your blog 🙄 cough (Lou). So don't think about what others might think about your writing style, content, use of language or even if you make grammar mistakes. Those all make you human and getting everything perfect is not only completely unnecessary, it's also hrad.

Another part of writing blogs is not just getting started, but the difficulty of maintaining one flow, one thought if you will. As a listener of well-written speeches you subconsciously notice that it was good, it was fulfilling, sublime. And that's what I love about such blogs or speeches. They just feel right somehow. But I myself have accepted that I can't accomplish such achievements in my own creative work. And I'm much better off with that acceptance. Because the benefit of accepting imperfection is getting things done. Not just 50%, not just 90%. Done. Completed, 100%. And this is something that many people struggle with, my past self included — actually just myself included.

But as Lou mentions, there are other easy methods to keep a common thread in the whole post, sticking to the story whilst thoughts might wander around in your own brain. Bringing all those thoughts on paper, or in this case on the keyboard can be challenging, especially when you are starting writing. But there is a reason why we learn such skills at school, they improve our cognitive health and development immensely. This is also why I heavily agree with Lou when he states that AI should never be used in the process of writing. It just has no benefits, neither for the reader and even less for you.

So I don't want to repeat what Lou says, but bullet points have helped me out a lot in the past. They just give me the feeling of constant structure, while my mind can play around with different thoughts and theories. This makes sure that you always come back to what you initially wanted to include in your post. "And if you can't come up with bullet points?", you might ask. Then you might need some more brainstormings or just showers.

In the end, these are some tips I can give you along the way:

Develop your own writing style, not by training, but just writing. Sooner or later you will notice what types you might like, some things you want to adopt from other bloggers, but summa summarum what you write will always be yours. You just share it with the world. It's up to you if you want to use a colon or hyphen here and there, use more dots, the past tense, imperativ, swear words or the more formal style. All those things will come automatically together and define you as a unique blogger. And you readers will value this individuality more than you know.

Don't take on too much. Might sound easy, but everyone falls regularly into this trap. Or maybe just people like me, having a mix of autism and perfectionism — idk.

Although it always sounds stupid: Start writing. And if it doesn't work, start writing the middle part. Because I know start and ending are always difficult, but imo the middle part goes down like butter.

Blogs have easy and hard sides: This is what the title says, but know that when I wrote all that I realised that I haven't answered that question at all... Thank god, that Jacob didn't type a question mark at the end of that suggestion. 🙏

Yeah, I guess that's it. If you want to share you thoughts, leave them in Lou's comments section.