I know, “Blogging is so 00’s…”. Maybe so. The webscape is littered with abandoned blogs.
But I propose that blogging is still a worthwhile endeavor, even if nobody ever reads your blog.
Why??
The main reason to start a blog is, of course, to broadcast your thoughts, ideas, and accomplishments, in the hope that they might be useful or interesting to other folks out there. People seem to have an in-built need to publish in this fashion; witness sites like Facebook, Reddit, and Bluesky. Satisfying that need brings some happiness.
But don’t underestimate some of the secondary benefits.
First, a blog can magnify the benefits of keeping a journal. If you don’t keep a journal, my advice is to start one. The act of formulating or re-formulating thoughts to write them down in a journal can often give you clarity about how to proceed, and keeps your projects and pursuits on track.
But going further and cleaning up and transforming those journal notes into a blog post that you know the outside world will see takes this effect to a new level. Re-examining what you did with an eye toward “this is going out to the world” often exposes sloppy thinking or just outright mistakes. When this happens for me, I then need to go back and make corrections and improvements in a project or pursuit that I thought was finished, which is not always the most fun, but the end result is that much better for it.
Second, there is a temptation to call a project “done”, or label it a “failure” when it stops being fun. There is nothing wrong with this. A theme of this site is keeping your mind active and engaged, but as soon as your “for fun” project starts feeling like work, it is fair to play the “But I’m retired!” card and move on to something else that seems fun. Retirement might be defined by giving yourself the freedom to be an intellectual butterfly. Or not to be intellectual at all for a while.
But I submit that you might be leaving some satisfaction on the table if you close down a project prematurely because the going got tough. Often, if I return to a project that I perhaps quit on too soon, time and distance allows me to come at it from a new angle and move the project forward again. If you make a habit of writing your projects up as blog posts, this can give you a bit of extra motivation to return to stalled projects and give them another look. Maybe inspiration will hit and you can finish the project properly.
And if those inspirations don’t come, finishing a project by clearly elucidating, in writing for the world, why the project “failed” (e.g. couldn’t get past a problem, it was too ambitious or misguided from the get-go, it became irrelevant after some facts came to light, etc) also feels good and has value. It gives closure.
So if you make a habit of making blog posts about your projects, you can often extract that last bit of joy and satisfaction from them by writing that summary blog post. Extra credit if you even post about projects that “failed” or didn’t turn out as well as you hoped, with a clear explanation of exactly why this happened.
How-to
The web is full of tutorials about how to get started with a blog. Most of them are thinly-cloaked advertisements for web hosting providers that want your money. That sounded more negative than I intended. Starting a blog by buying a soup-to-nuts package from one of these providers is not a bad way to go, if you shop around for the best deal.
There are three main steps to starting a blog:
- Register a domain name
- Decide on a blogging platform and configure it for how you want your site to look to users
- Find a place to host your website
Steps 1 and 3 generally incur a recurring monthly or yearly cost. Your choice for step 2 partially determines the costs for step 3.
The one-stop-shops (e.g. Wordpress.com, GoDaddy.com, many others) will carry out all these steps for you - register your domain name, set you up with a blogging platform (usually WordPress), and host your website.
Registering a Domain Name
Many different registrars can provide this service. I have used PorkBun. I like them because their yearly registration renewal price is the same as their introductory price, currently around $10 per year for a .com registration (prices vary for other domain extensions). Once your site is being served up at some (possibly free) web hosting service, you can set up your domain name to point at the IP address of the web host via a Name Server entry, to make your domain name visible to the world.
Blogging Platforms
Content Management System (CMS)
WordPress is a fine software platform for your blog, it offers a canned and very usable solution that can get you up and blogging quickly. You can choose from among hundreds of different themes that determine the overall look and feel of your blog. WordPress provides built-in site management pages where you tweak customization options, add new blog entries, and manage the website. But WordPress is backed by a database, which means it takes some non-trivial amount of resources at the hosting site to run it, which means it costs you a bit of money.
Other CMS options are available: Joomla, Drupal Note: The same caution applies to these CMS platforms.
Some Web Hosts also provide “Drag and Drop” web site building alternatives that are CMS-like. eg: SiteJet, Wix and Square.
Static Site Generators
If you are comfortable with treating your blog like a software project, using a free Static Site Generator (SSG) software package like Hugo for your blogging platform offers another very viable and cheaper route. SSGs provide a way to create and run your blog as a static web site, which means that the web host serving your blog just needs to serve up static, unchanging web pages (files) that have been pre-created. There is no database on the back-end. Serving up static pages requires few resources on the web host, so a number of places (Azure, GitHub Pages, Netlify, many more) will host your static web site for free, indefinitely. Which is a nice solution for step 3.
With Hugo, you can also choose from among hundreds of different themes, and these themes generally come with various options for configuring your site. You configure customizations by editing formatted text files (usually yaml, toml, or json) or by overriding certain files from within your selected theme. You create blog entries in individual markdown files in a directory structure on your hard drive that has been set up by Hugo. Then Hugo compiles your blog posts and customization files according to your selected theme, and produces an output directory tree containing the the ready-to-deploy static web site. Each time you add or edit blog posts or change configuration options, Hugo can automatically run the compilation step to re-generate the web site, which takes only a second or so. So as you save changes you can see those changes reflected almost immediately on a browser pointed to a localhost web server that Hugo helpfully sets up for you. When you are happy with your changes, the “compiled content” can be uploaded to the web host, which serves them up verbatim whenever somebody visits your site.
You are responsible for maintaining the markdown and customization files that comprise your blog, they are the source code for your web site. A great way to do this is to check the source files into a git repository on GitHub. You can then set up a GitHub Action that monitors your repo. When you push changes to your source files to GitHub, the GitHub Action can automatically run Hugo on your input files to produce the static web pages, then automatically upload those generated pages to your web host. If you use a free hosting service such as Azure, it can automatically set up this GitHub Action for you.
Hosting
If you go with a free host for your static website, your only recurring cost is for renewing your domain name registration. If you go with WordPress package hosting, it will cost you somewhere between $30 - $100 for the first year, but again shop carefully because subsequent years can really balloon up to 2-5x the first year price. So building a static web site definitely appeals to my Cheapskating leanings.
Maintaining Your Blog
It feels good to put up a working blog site. But most blogs go stale at some point because the author stops contributing. Life happens. This is not so terrible, even a blog that hasn’t had new posts for a long time is still serving up past content that some folks could find useful or interesting.
One way to keep your blog active is to integrate your blogging with your journaling. Personally, every blog post I have ever made has started out as text in my journal. I have journal pages that are lists of ideas and maybe some key sentences for possible future blog posts. Sometimes the act of turning journal entries into a polished post is a sizeable project of it’s own, but other times I know from the outset that I’m going to make a post about a topic, so the journal entries for that topic gets built from the ground up as a blog post. And as mentioned above, this generally results in higher-quality journal entries because they are written with the idea in mind that the outside world needs to be able to comprehend what was written. In this way writing blog posts complements and improves journaling, just as journaling complements and improves blog posts.
Another psychological key is to never think of your blogging as ‘work’. If you get fed up with wordsmithing a blog post, move on to something else for awhile. There are no deadlines.
Summary
This site started out as retirement project aimed at getting more familiar with web technology by starting a blog. This post is then essentially a blog post about a project that was undertaken to explore how to do a blog. Kind of Inception-esque, no? The original blog project was going to be me blogging about any topic whatsoever. But through discussions with friends, it grew into a website where several people write posts, all pertaining to a common theme: ways for brainy retirees to have a fulfilling retirement.
