A retrospective on blogging in 2024.

What went well

Let’s start on a positive note.

Micro.blog

2024 was the year I signed up to Micro.blog and actually posted something online.

This isn’t the first time I’ve made an attempt at blogging, and spoiler alert: it didn’t last very long, but it was the most blogging I’ve done in over a decade and so it deserves a teeny tiny amount of appreciation.

P in the Wild

I also started an outdoors blog called P in the Wild to share my outdoor activities.

The blog itself isn’t much but it gave me a space to share my trip to Scotland where I walked The West Highland Way, which I am proud of.

What didn’t go well

Now for the hard part, the things that could have gone better.

microblogging

I didn’t stick to blogging, and the longer you leave it the harder it is to jump back in, so you don’t.

Weeknotes

The downfall for me was writing weeknotes.

Originally my weeknotes were an attempt at sharing things that I didn’t post at the time they were happening. I’d say this is a bad reason to write weeknotes and instead I should have put more effort into sharing individual posts instead of letting them pile up.

I mention this because I missed a post one week and didn’t catch up. I invented these imaginary rules for how I would write and share what I was up to, like using weeknotes to link to individual posts, which meant I suddenly had a lot more posts to write, just so I could reference them.

This turned posting into a chore, and it became boring writing posts like why I cycled 100 miles in a week just so I could reference them in my weeknotes. This started a backlog of posts I felt I should write just to catch up.

I lost interest in writing them, so I didn’t.

Outdoors blog

Having a second blog made things more complicated than I expected. I intentionally wanted a separate outlet to cater to a different audience, but it didn’t take long for me to realise that doing so made my main blog worse, as now it was missing interesting content.

Professional blog

Being confused about a second blog made it impossible to start a third one. I liked the idea of having a shorter domain that was easier to spell and so claimed devoops.micro.blog before anyone else could. I thought it could be the home to all my content about working on the web, before I realised that the whole point of sharing this content was to have my name attached to it.

What to do going forward

Keep it simple.

And maybe revisit weeknotes at a later date.

The plan is to use Micro.blog for everything. It’ll be my social outlet that links to everything else, wherever that is.

There will be a few posts on the outdoors blog, and then I’ll link to it from my main one. I might be double posting to the timeline but I don’t expect it to happen often.

As for content, I don’t know exactly what I’ll end up writing about.

I’ve got a rough plan but it isn’t all worked out yet.

And I’m ok with that.