A Case for the Blog and Why I Started One
I've never really enjoyed writing. It has always felt more like a chore than a hobby. For this reason, the concept of blogging never really captured my interest. I've been designing and building websites for as long as I can remember, but in that time I had never found the reason or motivation to start a blog.
But over the past few years, as my personal portfolio website fell out of date and irrelevant to the multitude of projects I was working on, I realized I needed a better way to document and share my journey and experiences in design, tech, and life in general.
I needed a home base, an online repository of who I am, what I do, and what I think. Even if no one read it.
The usual suite of social media accounts are great, but they are inherently ephemeral. Posts can get lost in the noise, you delete them in favor of newer content, or the platform itself may fall out of popularity entirely, and your carefully cultivated presence will mean nothing without some sort of bridge.
That's not to say that social media is bad, or ineffective at reaching an audience. Obviously, it's quite the opposite. But that bridge, which can serve as the foundational layer to an effective online social presence, is the blog. In this way, social media is complementary to the blog.
The blog is a permanent (for as long as you keep it live), fully-autonomous (it's your code on your domain, and not subject to the whims of other platforms) public journal of your online personal brand.
It's a digital home base, from which the rest of your social media accounts can be linked. And it serves as a central repository for your thoughts and the baseline for your discussions elsewhere on the web.
In essence, if you are the brand, your blog is the product.
After a couple of false starts, I've committed myself to writing on a more frequent basis — about anything.
My blog is the repository of my mind and the foundational home base I described above, and it helps me better reflect on and collect my thoughts on all the awesome stuff I'm working on with truly awesome people. This time, I actually can't wait to write more.