Why am I not blogging?

Goddamnit, I haven’t blogged in forever. I at least started a post on robotsconf, but never finished it. I’m damn well going to blog about *something* today, so, let’s talk about possible explanations for my not blogging.

This is going to be a rambling stream-of-consciousness post with no editing except to combat autocorrect. Because one of the things that makes it hard to blog is worrying about whether I could have phrased it better. The internet can be pretty mean, and if one little sentence is badly phrased then someone’s going to jump on it. :/

Which brings me to another issue: my blog is adrift on the internet at large, instead of being part of a community. When it was a part of planetkde, and I was contributing steadily, I always knew what I wanted to talk about and who was going to read it. Even when I didn’t have some cool feature to blog about, I knew my audience. I had a feel for how many off topic posts I should write to let people know about my hobbies without boring them too much.

Now, my hobbies are in chaos – I can’t seem to settle on one thing for more than a couple of sessions – my work isn’t something I can blog about much (and NIR would most people care) and I have no fucking clue who’s reading this.

I know that I’ve picked up some followers of my food posts (sorry, no time for that lately, Pete’s doing most of the cooking), I know some tiny subset of kde people still follow my blog, and I know some people read it via twitter now that I’m auto-tweeting my posts and actually using twitter. (Actually that last one scares me a bit, you never know who’s going to end up seeing it there…)

Twitter might be part of the problem too… The free time I do have is easily sucked up by reddit and twitter. And I don’t feel like twitter is a choice, because I’d miss out on stuff in various tech circles if I didn’t check it at least every couple of days. It keeps me feeling connected in these not-quite-communities around js, Vancouver tech, etc.

But, yeah, time is an issue. I started this post on the bus, and now I’m writing during lunch while the rest of the company chats. After work and dinner, I generally don’t want to do anything hard, and blogging is hard. It takes a good 2-4 hour block for me to do a good post, iirc, and if I’m interrupted I tend to lose interest. I have that time on the weekend but I have a million other hobbies and chores and social events competing for my attention then (and if it’s work-related I can take some work time but there aren’t many of those). Plus it’s hard to convince myself the post is worth writing if I don’t know who’s reading it.

Another thing that bugs me is this WordPress app.  For the most part it’s a good app, but it has a fatal flaw: it is way too easy to publish by accident. That makes me reluctant to use it the more complex my topic is. And with the small screen it’s hard to review a post – I don’t seem to have a preview at all here – so I always want to finish editing on a desktop and publish from there.

Oh well. This time I’m just going to hit send and damn the consequences :p