15: Two Ways I Mucked My Blog

So I'm still very new at blogging. And I've done something really stupid things in the process. Things like overwhelm myself with grandiose ideas, failing to plan, forgetting to schedule, stacking my website like an overloaded Publix sub sandwich that I can't fit in my mouth! Silly me. But these things will happen if one is trying new things. Here's to hoping this post helps someone from making the same mistakes!

NOT PLANNING FOR PROCESS OR SCHEDULE

Whoo, boy. This is embarrassing to share. But I've come right to the edge of the blog diving board several times without taking the plunge. The first time, I came in around new years all gung-ho for the idea of a blog. [Ah, new years and the resolution hype gets me every time!] So I wrote a whole bunch of idealistic notions and ideas down in one inspired journal entry. And then did nothing for about a year. When new year came around again I kickstarted with one introductory post in January. And then did nothing for 8 months. ::sigh:: Like a fickle teenager, oscillating from obsession and abandonment - I just couldn't willpower myself into consistency.

Eventually, I returned back to the goal and wrote down each stage of the process in detail. Write the entry. Edit the words. Sketch the accompanying illustrations. Draw the illustrations in color. Polish the post. Automate for publishing. 6 stages - Write, Edit, Sketch, Draw, Polish, Publish. And once I figured that out, I could finally do the responsible planner thing and blocked it into my calendar. Every first Tuesday of the month, I open up a google doc stacked with a list of ideas to review them and add new ideas. Every Friday, I block an hour of time to do a stream of conscious first draft. I use the last week of the month to sketch, draw and color the blog opening illustrations. The first week of the month I polish and upload the images and then set the blog date to automatically publish. And then I move on to the next post.

Sometimes I have to tweak the system so that I give a little more wiggle room. I pushed my publishing date to mid-month because I find the first of the month too initmidating. I sometimes sketch when I get the idea because I'm more inspired by the illustration than the post. Sometimes it goes the opposite way. I'm not die-hard about the schedule and I will shift it if I need to. The more important thing is to have them on the schedule in small bits so that I can shift forward on that diving board.

TAKEAWAYS:

• Don't set up a goal without a system.

• Don't set up a system without a calendar.

• Be assertive in making up a system, try it, test it, tweak it. Don't give up.

• If you get squished for time, do less (shorter writing time, smaller illus) to still make it work.

NOT LEARNING ABOUT WEB OPTIMIZATION

I'm still in the process of learning how to make my website. When we moved to Windhoek, Namibia my internet access diminished considerably. The service just isn't as fast or as consistent. And I kept loading more and more blog posts into the system with really large illustrations. I was in that exciting and productive stage.

And then one day I tried to share one of my blog posts with a friend but she couldn't get the page to load. So I tried to do it myself and whadayaknow - each page was too heavy to load. So I started researching different ways to make the pages load faster. And I realized I had loaded up my website with big illustrations that weren't reduced for the screen size, and that hadn't been through a lossy compressor app or plug-in. So my website sandwich was too thick to bite. Who knew you had to go through that process?

So now I'm going back through and fixing each illustration. (Shout out to Igniting Business for publishing the blog post on this exact problem so I could fix it. But there are also so many other videos and online resources about this if you're curious.) Now I'm resizing each finished illustrations small enough to fit on a regular screen without losing sharpness and then compressing them enough to take up less weight on the page.

TAKEAWAYS:

• Resize illustrations to fit the maximum screen size of a laptop.

• Compress images (tinypng, eeew, imageoptim) and save it in a separate file.

• Test the blog pages by using a website optimizer.

I wish I could say that I have licked all my blogging problems. But I'm still making plenty of mistakes - like not linking social media enough (I ghosted LinkedIn years ago, it makes my skin itch to blog blast on Facebook, and I barely share my blog posts on Insta). Or not optimizing SEO. (I have so little idea what SEO means. But I've set aside time on Fridays to start researching it little by little). And I'm sure there are other things that I don't even realize are wrong yet.

But I'm plunging in anyway.

Because a) I like sharing stories, b) I love organizing things, c) I'm a persistent girl, and more importantly, d) I imagine that I'm somehow in service to my own perfectionist healing by just sharing. I can still be too precious about everything and either overdo it or just abandon it altogether. As I'm getting older, I'm trying to be more accepting of human error and just fail anyway. Because in the process, I'm often failing forward.

It's so embarrassing and I have to make room for the emotions of anxiety and shame. But I know it's good healing for my mind and my heart. And in the journey, I learn something new, I become more robust and more willing to experiment - which is great for being an artist. And honestly, I hope it can make it easier for someone else to find their way, too. But that's maybe going a bit too far?

cheers for failing forward,

smarti