It’s been about a month since my last update and I feel like a lot happened, but sometimes I’m not sure anything happened at all. I’ve been studying like crazy from behind the scenes, but I think everything I need to learn is really difficult. Especially because, as I said last time, I don’t even know what I need to learn. I didn’t know where to start.
I did figure that out and honestly the last month has mainly been me trying to figure out what is essential to learn when building a website. I feel like I wasted a lot of time trying to learn things that was too difficult or not relevant at my current level, but I try to tell myself that I still learned something. That’s got to be the important thing, right? As long as I learned something it’s not wasted time. No such thing as wasted time.
So, what happened so far?
If you read my website regularly, then you might have discovered one major change already. I have removed all comments and the possibility to comment on my posts. I am not saying I’ll never allow this again, but right now I feel it’s for the best.
You see, it’s been causing me a hellish amount of stress. Not that many people commented so far, but I didn’t expect so. This is still a really new blog and I’m trying to figure things out as I go and until now PR has never been a big issue. I didn’t use my existing network and didn’t majorly promote it either. The reason for this is simply that I felt I needed to get used to the idea of blogging and putting myself out there – me, the real and honest me. My odd opinions and eccentricities on display for everyone to see. I am so used to people not believing me when I’m honest, I felt sure that none of you, my dear readers, would believe me either. I needed to feel sure of myself before I really started sharing my blog – before I started sharing me.
Don’t misunderstand. I love when you share my posts and my blog. I love it. I never wanted to keep my blog a secret known only to a selected few, I want to share it with everyone who wants to read it. I am truly grateful that you have read, enjoyed and shared my posts as you have and I hope you’ll continue to do so in the future. I will do some proper promoting of my blog when I feel more certain I know what I’m doing, but honestly, I felt it was more important to learn the basics of blogging first. To feel comfortable with my website and know I have done all I can to create a foundation of awesome content.
If you have read my blog on a weekly basis, you probably know as well as I do, that my writing has changed a lot over the last couple of months, just like I have.
Now, the reason I’ve removed all comments is simply because it stressed me out a lot, but it was not because only a few people commented. I am so happy you did, because connecting through my writing is one of the things that make me happier than most other things and reading you comments had me on cloud nine for weeks after. The problem is that I get an increasing number of spam and I don’t have money to spend on this blog. I used everything I had to create this website a few months back and cannot afford any other additional costs right now, so getting a plug-in or something to help me out is not an option – at least not right now.
Figuring out what is spam and what is not can be seriously difficult, and to be real with you, seeing I have a comment only to realise that it’s spam is making me a bit sad every time. Spam is, in fact, taking a lot of happiness out of writing my blog and I’m afraid you might have suffered under my unhappiness quite a few times. I don’t want to be like that or feel so much stress while I am trying to learn all these really difficult things, and because of that I decided to remove the comments and the possibility to comment on any future posts that I write.
If you do want to comment, you still can if you go to my Twitter or Tumblr, where I post regularly. I post something there every time I post something on my blog and you are always welcome to go back the post that is relevant and comment there. You can also message me directly on my blog if you are so inclined.
My decision is not final, but more like an experiment in figuring out what works for me. If you think I should let you guys comment on the posts themselves, please let me know in one of the before mentioned ways.
Also, I’ve been considering creating a mailing list so that I can communicate more directly to my most regular readers. I started it twice, in fact, but hated the design of it all in the end and have therefore put a pause on that too. If you would like a mailing list, let me know about that too!
As you may have noticed I’ve not been using Instagram that much, but I’ll experiment a little with that in the future too and see what happens. Not sure if I love it or not right now, but we’ll see.
I have been thinking a lot about my blog and what I want to do with it in the future. It seems like blogging has a way of pulling you in and making you love it more all the time. No love is easy, however, and the work you have to put into it is generally proportional to how much you love it – whether it be friendships, relationships or work.
Most blogs that are created fail, however, but I am not sure if they only fail because people give up or focus on things that aren’t really all that relevant. In order for me to figure out whether or not I feel successful or like a failure depends on what I want from this work. I wish I knew, but I just don’t know for sure anymore. I think, perhaps, I am on a path towards making my blog an essential part of who I am and not just something I do because it makes me happy – that, my dear readers, is all kinds of scary. I can’t tell for sure, though, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see what the future brings.
