Rediscovering Joy in Blogging
I wish I have restarted my blog on Bear earlier. It was a chance meeting at the end of a long chain of web surfing when I was bored and curious what the indie web was about now.
I was so happy to see all these... barebones posts, layout that made text looked good.
See, my last days on Wordpress were a slog because for each and every post I wrote, however short, I felt compelled to have an image to go with it. Or two, more like, the header and the thumbnail, or risk making the layout weird and/or uncomfortable. I'm long-winded and my brain is very textual, but all the platforms made it look like images were absolutely necessary. In the end, I stopped posting short notes because I couldn't be bothered to make them pretty. It was a friction I could do without.
I'm not against picture. I do Visual Novels, for heaven's sake, and I know where to look for high-quality stock photo. I'm not even against decorations. But having to bloat the page with superfluous pictures that may or may not be relevant to my writing was tedious, even a bit dishonest to me.
After I lost my blog and my website, I tried going elsewhere. I posted three short stories in Tapas before I gave up, because every single story requires a cover image, a... Banner? All in all I had to prep three images for each posting.
Editing was easy. I was no pro but getting something mildly passable for this kind of purpose took like ten minutes on Canva, but it annoyed me so.
Now I can write things blazing fast, publish it no-frills, and be done with it without setting aside a dedicated timeslot in my day.
That being said, I won't deny that another big reason is my shifting mindset. I no longer care that much about getting noticed like in my teens. I used to take it far too seriously, treating my existence on the web as an extension of me. Something to impress a potential employer. Back then, I would ruminate on the way I write things, worrying that people would judge my writing skill based on the way I write in my blog. In hindsight, it's rather silly. I won't talk to you the same way if I meet you in the meeting room and if I meet you over coffee. I didn't want to look stupid, but you couldn't learn without being wrong.
Now? If someone doesn't like my wall of text, I'm sorry, there are millions of blogs out there you could read. If someone dislikes or disagrees with my posts, they could go and make their reaction posts! If I'm wrong, then next time I know better.
Going back has been funny. I told myself I won't muck around the design too much, but if you have visited this site before you know that's a lie. I never could resist.
Despite making web games every now and then over the years I stopped blogging, my CSS game is rusty. You could do a lot by styling just a couple key components, never touching the newfangled stuff ever.
I just noticed that pure CSS has grown so much that it's capable of nifty animations when exploring Narrat. Things I used to do with JQuery is now available without Javascript witchery. What do you mean it also has keyframes? It is lowkey mindblowing. I know, some of you would say, "Yo, what? That's been out for ages!" It's still mindblowing for me.
But CSS selector is still wack, making something looks exactly the same across browsers is still rocket science, and despite my love-hate relationship to web design thing I'm forced to acknowledge that I am having fun.