This is a little bit weird. Starting a blog feels old and new at the same time. New, because I haven't set up a website in many years, and old, because this is not my first plunge into the sea of blogging and "content creation".
I grew up with the internet. I was 11 when the World Wide Web (www) was born and 13 or 14 when I started to play around in HTML. Back then the first version of CSS was just released and we barely used it. Websites had almost no styling and if you wanted a complicated layout you had to use tables.
A few years later, blogging was invented. Somewhere someone came up with the idea to write articles, sort them chronologically and release them alongside an RSS feed for others to subscribe to.
Blogging was actually way older. It started before the www with Usenet posts and it continued before RSS feeds were a thing, with personal diaries. But it really took off in the late 90s/early 2000s which is also when the term blog was invented coming from the much less cool weblog.
I was always part of it somehow. I had my own websites, I used blogging services, I started using content management systems and so on. But I also always struggled with creating content and writing. Every project would eventually die down and be forgotten.
And then social media came and changed the game completely. And I learned something new about me:
I hate Social Media!
Of course I had it all. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Instagram… you name it. But as I am a little socially awkward I always felt a little bit uncomfortable. It's the same with small talk. I'm jealous of people who can just start talking about themselves without doubting if someone actually wants to hear it and finds it interesting. I couldn't do that and still can't. Which meant that more than once I deleted all my posts and started anew just to delete it all again a few months later.
"Why would anyone want to read about me and my boring life?" That's always my first thought. I don't have a fascinating hobby, I don't "nerd out" over something interesting, and I'm also not a very good writer. Especially not in a foreign language.
But recently I was introduced to the Indieweb (by this guy) and found my way to a beautiful post by Manuel Moreale about how it's not important what you write and that it doesn't have to be perfect. And that really resonated with me.
So … here it is. I started. I don't know how often I will write a post, I don't know what I'll write about, and I really don't care if anyone is ever going to read this. But I feel like this is a useful tool just to focus my mind in moments where it is all over the place, to think about something else than the daily doom messages, and to improve my writing in the english language.
Here goes nothing.