my first week on Bear Blog
I set up my blog here on Thursday last week. Here are my impressions and thoughts after one week of blogging.
The freedom of not having a concept
I have created blogs before, but the majority of them didn't last very long. A big reason was setting too many limitations right away, I think. It was always "OK, so this blog is going to be about only this" or "I'm going to follow this format for every entry." As long as my interest in that one specific thing was high, it went alright. But as soon as my interest diminished, I had nothing else to fall back to. And usually, that resulted in the blog slowing down, and eventually becoming inactive.
This blog is different in that it doesn't really have a proper theme or concept (yet). I write about the stuff I want to write about, with the only limitation being that it has to be connected to my personal life. This has given me lots of freedom, and has made me write more. If I don't want to make a post in a certain format or on a certain topic, I just do something else instead.
Eventually, I want to bring some structure into this. For example. I have already made a tentative list of sections that I could divide the blog into. But for now, I'm still having fun experimenting. Recently, I read some articles on the concept of "digital gardening", which I found to be very intriguing. Maybe I'll even try to move away from the typical "reverse chronological order" blog structure. That could be a bit tricky, since Bear Blog is intended to be - well - a blog, but it could be interesting.
So far, I've made almost one post per day. As the novelty wears off, I'm probably going to slow down a bit. However, my list of ideas is long enough that I'm not going to run out of steam very soon.
The simplicity is great
The setup for the blog was really easy and quick. With my previous blogs, there were so many customization options - usually, I spent the first day just picking a theme and fiddling with the design. In contrast, Bear Blog was just "plug and play." If my previous blogs were newfangled toys with all sorts of buttons, decorations and add-ons, this one is like an old-fashioned wooden toy made out of two or three parts. It's not flashy, but tactile and intriguing in its simplicity.
In the first week, I've adjusted things a bit (changed the name to one I liked better, tweaked the colors, made a logo and favicon). I want to add some more design flourishes, but overall, I want to keep it simple. Adding too much "stuff" could easily become a hassle in the long run, as it just adds things that you have to update when making changes.
The "why" question
Of course, blogging - especially in the current mode I'm in, where I'm not really writing for any sort of audience - comes with the question "why even do this?" I do a lot of physical notetaking, I have a (paper) journal, and a Hobonichi planner ... at some point, you start asking yourself if all this record-keeping isn't becoming a bit ridiculous. However, I feel like if I try, I can get all these things into a good balance, which each of them fulfilling their own function.
In some ways, this blog is like a digital journal. But my actual journal is for private things. Here, I'm posting about things that I'm OK with people (strangers) seeing, and that I wouldn't use my pens for. For example, while I enjoy writing by hand, creative writing is just so much more convenient and less of a hassle with a computer. I also think that turning thoughts into text form and putting them "out there" engages areas in my brain that make me think about things a bit differently. My audience may be very small, almost nonexistent. But even just the assumption of writing texts that others might read puts me in a different headspace that can be conducive to new ideas and impulses.
Also, the rise of auto-generated content in the past few years has made me want to "push back" a bit, in a way. I know that I, as a single person, can do very little against the every-raising tide of AI slop, and that the contents of this blog might (at some point) get scraped up by some crawler and fed to a LLM. But even then, I want to "do my part" in keeping at least one part of the internet genuinely human-made, even if it sounds a bit silly.