Chasing good instead of perfect

For over a year now, I've wanted to redo my blog and make it a space that was mine. My free WordPress site worked well for a while, but I really wanted my blog to be free of ads and totally customizable.

Launching this website has been exciting for me for that reason — it can be anything I want it to be. As you might imagine, now that it can be anything, it's a bit paralyzing deciding what it will be.

Over the last year and a half I've spent significantly more time reading other peoples' blogs, especially after I deleted Twitter. Part of the reason I'm so excited to start blogging again is because I'm drawing inspiration from so many of the sites that I love to read and trying to emulate what they do well while still making it my own.

The issue at hand

My current dilemma is that there seem to be so many choices to make about this blog.

• Do I pick a niche or write about whatever I want?
• Do I write my personal thoughts or keep it career-oriented?
• Do I try to monetize it in any way?
• How elaborate should its design be?

When I look at my blogroll, there's no real consensus about any of these options, other than the fact that most do not show ads. Each site manages to successfully share excellent content while maintaining the personality of the blog itself — in other words, these tradeoffs seem to be mostly up to the blogger's own taste and vision for their site.

My decision

After thinking this over for a few months, I've decided that trying to perfect the details of my blog at its inception has caused me such paralyzing indecision that it's best to focus on the most important thing: writing blog posts.

I've been out of practice for over a year, and I need to start writing again before I can truly determine what I want to write and what I want to share with the world.

So for the next year, I've decided to own the "work-in-progress" label here. I want free rein to try new designs, to add and delete pages, to write whatever I want, and to completely ignore things like "branding", "niches", "monetization", "promotion", and "SEO".

My audience is me.

And the most important thing is to stick with it.

The challenges

I'm already getting distracted by ideas about digital gardens and personal knowledge bases. I want to try Fruition. I want to try Obsidian.

I have to reel myself back in from trying to find the perfect system and instead focus on committing to the one I currently have.

There will be space to grow, change, and try new things.

For now, one step at a time.