On Blogging

Businessman frustrated with technologyI had a little extra time at the end of my workday on Monday, and I thought I would change some things around on my blog. I’ve never really been happy with my current template (or “theme” to use the lingo), and wanted to explore some options.

So if you signed on at the appropriate time, you would have seen some very different looks. Each time I would switch themes, look at the homepage with consternation, search through my dashboard for a fix to my newest self-imposed problem, play around for thirty minutes, and then give up. I repeated this cycle several times. After all of this “work” I let out a deep sigh, said “Fuck it,” and now I’m left with a blog that looks identical to the one I had.

My own incompetence was especially frustrating in light of the beautiful sample themes I saw before my very eyes. I would look at one after another, say to myself, “Oh, that looks very professional,” install it, and have it look nothing like the sample. Some learning curves are more steep than others.

Naturally, all of this takes away from the precious little time I have to write–which, is sort of the whole point in this endeavor. This, in turn, leads me to an internal struggle over the importance of aesthetics vs. content. I want my blog to look good, and with the increasingly short attention spans of Internet readers, this is important. On the other hand, it can look amazing, but that won’t get me anywhere unless I can distinguish myself based on content. To paraphrase a poker saying about luck vs. skill, “Blogging is 100% about looks, and 100% about content.”

Perhaps I’ll play with it more this weekend (read: “You should expect my blog to look exactly the same for a very long time”).

Update, 3.5 years later. I’ve finally found a new theme that I like moderately better than my old one. I’d like to think I’ve gotten better at this whole “blogging” thing in that time, but I’ll let the reader be the judge of that. 

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