I've been finding it hard to get into the groove of writing. Every time I think about working on the blog, my mind invariably steers towards the technological aspects behind this site and I start thinking about refactoring the site and the code behind it, the domain settings, and other ways in which I could make it cooler which in turn leads me to go down the rabbit hole that is the interwebs and research the technical details to no end. I then realized that this sounds awfully similar to endless refactoring that software developers often get sucked into and forget what the initial goal was or when to stop.
Perhaps a lot of authors don't have this problem as they use standard blogging platforms and focus just on the content i.e. they write, they publish and repeat. They either don't care about the technical details of the site or get someone's help to take care of it for them or are great about distinguishing writing vs maintainence of ths site. And since I decided to set this whole thing up on my own( except the github hosting part ), I need to focus on content and figure out a better way to manage my efforts between content generation vs site enhancement. After all a fast, swanky blog site without content isn't really a blog.
Two weeks ago, I was driving up to work with my wife and her colleague and something came up in our convesation that I thought would be a great forcing function to get started on writing. It's a weekly meetup that happens around the Silicon valley called "Shut up and Write!" . The idea is pretty simple: A bunch of people meetup at a cafe, chat for a couple of minutes, the clock starts and everyone shuts up and writes for one hour. Pretty cool eh. I signed up. When I got there, I was the only one without a laptop. I had my Midori Traveller's notebook(which by the way is pretty cool and demands its own post) with me, so I actually wrote(as in pen and paper) about What-How-When i.e.
What do I write about ? How do I structure the content on the site ? When do I publish my first post ?
What I have a couple of categories nailed down. Photography : i.e. posts about my experiences with photography and how I'm developing that hobby. Software : i.e. posts about all things code, software delivery, process, people and teams. Projects : i.e. posts about things that I tinker with. The internal Debate : This is a fuzzy one. Things that I'm conflicted about. Perhaps if I put it down in words, it'll bring better clarity. Personal : i.e. posts about things that have influenced me.
How I need to figure out how to setup the blog so that the categories are separate. Some of them might overlap. So I'll probably need a tagging system so that the same post can show up in more than one place. Something like /blog/photography, /blog/software ... Each post would also have a tag. So if a post P has both 'photography' and 'software' it'll appear in both categories.
When I decided to write about this effort of getting into writing ( meta - writing ? ) and publish it before 15th August. So here I am, on my second week with "Shut up and Write", with my laptop this time, writing this post.
Thanks to this meetup and @NehaAggarwal2 who introduced me to this meetup, I now have an hour blocked off every week to write. If I don't do it at any other time, I can atleast do it in this slot and that should keep me going. Reminds me of coding. You have to get into "the zone" and it just flows. Same principle. It's blows my mind how simple the idea of a focused time bound effort can be applied to anything and yet it's one of the hardest things to do.