A Question

I often question the value of keeping a blog. Is there really any point in doing what I do? It’s a question I have been asking myself with increasing frequency lately. The whole process is frustrating, humbling and time-consuming. When the stars align, and I write something worthwhile, and someone sees fit to leave a response, its an amazing experience, but those moments are too few and far between.

I have, on countless occasions, written entire posts, spent hours editing, or rewriting them, only to abandon any hope of ever actually publishing them because I wasn’t 100% happy with the way they read, or with the very premise of them existing as part of some imagined legacy that I want to keep.

On other occasions, I spend too little time editing, or rewriting, or even considering the place of a particular blog post, and hit the publish button prematurely. All this serves to do is to bring the quality of my content, and therefore the quality of how I am perceived, down. Ultimately, I am only as good as what I publish.

When I do get it right, however, and I manage to write something that I feel is both of value, and well-written enough to be sent out into the world, it often falls onto a deaf, uncaring, or, more likely, uninterested world. Praise and positive reinforcement are not the reason I publish my musings, but I would be lying if I said that receiving comments, starting a discussion, or getting an email from someone about one of my posts was not something that I cared about. I have tried once before to run this blog sans comments, but I lose the sense of audience, or even the possibility of audience, and it fundamentally changes the way I write, and definitely for the worse.

As an aspiring web designer, I am also plagued with another problem with my blog: a lack of satisfaction with the design. Whilst this current design is only the third design that has been live on the site, the version number in my web design folder is marked as 13, with another design in the works. That’s right, this blog has been live for under a year, and I have started to code 14 different designs for the site, as well as brainstorming and sketching out countless others.

The time spent on sketching, and hypothesising of possible designs for the site has often brought me to my knees creatively. Writing HTML and CSS is my one creative outlet. My vice, my escape, my hobby, my passion. When I hit that wall of creative block, I have no outlet, and my passion lay fallow, eating away at me that I should be working on something, only to sit down and try and get angry when the code doesn’t come pouring out of my fingers and into the computer.

I do have idea’s for this blog, and even other projects. The three most preferred idea’s right now all involve design and development of individual blog posts. Unfortunately that would inevitably involve more time, and more frustration.

I’m not certain of what to do, or where to go from here. As it stands, I’ll continue to play it by ear, and post with the same sporadic frequency, and with the same variable quality, and continue to wonder what the value of keeping a blog is.