Ben Barden

Products - Projects - Process

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Blogging mistakes – and how to avoid them

At a recent department tech talk, I was asked to say a few words about blogging – as I was once known for blogging about blogging.

Over the last few years, my blogging frequency has decreased a lot. With a list of failed blogs behind me, it feels somewhat disingenuous to talk about blogging.

However, you can still learn from your mistakes. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. To that end, here are a few of the biggest mistakes I’ve made, with tips for how to avoid doing the same things yourself.

Starting a blog for the sake of it

It’s exciting to start a new blog. It’s much harder to keep it going.

It can be far too easy to come up with an idea and jump right in without thinking it through. First off, why are you starting a blog? What will it be about? Who’s it for?

It’s OK if you want to start a hobby blog just for fun. It doesn’t have to be part of a business. It doesn’t have to make money. But be clear on your reasons before diving right in.

An example of where I went wrong is I was writing about blogging, but never really had a point to it. There wasn’t a particular area of blogging I focused on. I didn’t target a particular type of blogger. The focus was very broad – and interest in the blog was fairly low.

Not having a plan

It’s easy to lose interest in a blog if you start without figuring out what direction you want to take it in.

Having some specific goals helps. For instance, if you write 1 post per week, you’ll have 52 posts if you keep that up for a year. But is that your objective? Does it matter to you?

Perhaps your goal is to learn something new, and to use your blog to write about how it’s going. Or you’d like to share your insights on a topic you already know – learning more along the way – and when you have enough posts, you could compile these into an eBook.

You don’t have to tell anyone else about your goals – they’re just for you. But it will help if you have a plan so you know where you’re going – and to see if you’re on track, or going off course.

Procrastination

Should I start a blog? What should I call it? Will anybody read it? Why even bother starting if it might not go anywhere?

It’s definitely possible to overthink things, and end up not having a go.

You can always start a blog and get some posts up without telling the world about it right away. I think it’s far better to get 5-6 posts up first, than to share your brand new blog name, design, and first “welcome!” post – only to lose interest and never post again.

Trying to go it alone

Solo blogging can be lonely. Finding other people with blogs who you can follow (and vice versa) can make blogging a much more social activity.

Having a clear focus can help. For instance, a blog about a specific topic can make it easier to find others in your field, than if you have a multi-topic blog where you write about anything and everything. I’m still guilty of this …

You can also write guest posts for other people’s blogs – or even start a group blog, where several people contribute.

Not making it a habit

You don’t have to publish a post every day. Readers might not want to read a post from you that often anyway!

But you can still do something every day, and find a sustainable rhythm for getting a new post up. You could write every day even if you don’t publish a post. Learn something every day. Take a photo every day. Post on social media every day. Or whatever takes your fancy.

I’ve tried most possible rhythms for publishing new content. Daily – 5 times a week – 3 times a week – once a week – or less. You definitely need a plan – and a lot of post ideas – to maintain a regular posting frequency. But the consistency of regular posting can be very good for turning blogging into a habit.

In summary

  1. think about why you want to blog
  2. have a plan
  3. don’t overthink it – give it a try
  4. connect with other bloggers
  5. make blogging a habit

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New Twig-based theme, now with added Bootstrap 5.1

After an unsuccessful attempt to update the theme on my blog last night, I’ve had a second attempt. This one works better. As always, there are things still to be tweaked – but it’s a start.

To catch you up on yesterday’s post, I’ve installed Timber, a handy plugin that allows you to build Twig-based themes in WordPress. I’ve modified the starter theme and added Bootstrap 5.1, which makes it a lot easier to do a sidebar and will help with future edits.

Here’s a screenshot of how things look at the moment.

It looks ok. It might look better when I tweak things a bit more.

The code is on Github if you’re interested to have a look.

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A small blog refresh

I’ve been thinking whether to move to a different blogging platform, roll my own, use static files, or simply change the theme.

This is far from the first time I’ve come to this point. Years ago I wrote my own CMS. Prior to that I used static HTML. I’ve also used lots of different platforms. In short, while the tech behind the blog is important to a point, I feel it’s secondary to the posts. I don’t want to focus too heavily on the tech and lose sight of the content.

For the time being, I’m sticking with WordPress and taking Timber for a spin. Timber allows you to create Twig-based themes and abstract the WordPress-y bits out of the templates. I use PHP for Switch Scores, but it’s a different world when you use Twig for templating, and Laravel for the framework. I’ve never really wanted to build a WordPress theme, as it feels like the “old days” of templating, with a mixture of PHP, HTML, and arbitrary WordPress functions all over the place.

My blog theme isn’t the smartest – it’s a poor imitation of the previous WordPress theme I was using – but something I’d always wanted to do was displaying lozenges, or “badges” (a la Bootstrap) for the categories on each post. Voila!

It’s got a bunch of things I need to fix (maybe don’t look at it on mobile), but it’s a start, and hopefully gives me a nudge to start posting content again.

Edit: Famous last words – I’ve temporarily reverted to the previous theme as it looks like there are a few things to fix.

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Thoughts on tech support

In tech, providing some kind of support is essential. However, I’ve found that a lot of people don’t want to do it.

Maybe I’m weird – but I quite like tech support.

Support is a great way to learn, and can be quite varied and interesting. Sometimes it’s given to new or junior team members – but I’d argue it’s important for everyone to do it now and again. Tech rarely stands still, both within a business and in the wider industry. Support gives you a snapshot of the types of things that people are dealing with day to day.

I find support to be quite social. I get to interact with far more people when doing support than if I’m buried in a project. Don’t get me wrong, I like the projects too – but I like having the opportunity to do a bit of support too.

We use Slack for our support, and I’d say it helps with keeping things friendly. Thinking about it, almost every company I contact for support does it all via email. Credit to the fine folks at Kolide for opening up a shared Slack channel with us and giving us a great way to communicate with them, so we can reach them on Slack and not worry about email.

I also find it immensely satisfying and rewarding to be able to answer questions and solve issues for people. The “big ticket” items such as rolling out Okta are huge, but sorting out smaller things is also important.

One downside is if you’re trying to focus on something and you keep getting interrupted with support requests. Teams can solve this though. I’m in a team of four and we each do one week of support every 4 weeks. It works well and keeps things fair.

Sometimes the same things come up repeatedly, and you find yourself answering the same things over and over. This is a good opportunity to write a few guides. It’s much easier to share a link than keep writing the same answer. And when the same things keep coming up, this can help you identify issues with tooling, or process improvements you could make.

I think there’s a lot of good reasons to do support now and again.