Attempt at The Bear Blog Challenge
I've been seeing a lot of people doing this challenge created by Ava on the Discovery feed, and it seemed like a whole lot of fun so here I am :)
Why did you make the blog in the first place?
I wanted a personal space that I could share long form content! I'm on Tumblr, Reddit, and Instagram but I never really felt like posting much written content there for the most part as I didn't find them very appealing.
I also find that I do not have much hobbies or activities that gives me a space to be creative much. Yes, I write papers for uni which allows me to dive into topics that I never would but they tend to be very structured, impersonal, and of course in academic jargon that isn't something I tend to want to do during my free time.
Blogging would give me a space that won't be too pressure-inducing as the expectations are not too high. It can be everything or nothing at all.
Why did you choose Bearblog?
I was looking up free or low-cost platforms for blogging, and the only other contendor was micro.blog, but I didn't really like the documentation. I believe I saw a Reddit comment about Bear Blog, and read Herman's blog, perused a couple of blogs on the Discovery feed and really liked the platform.
It's free for most of the features, and I think it's pretty sufficient for my needs so far. I'll be using it for the next few months, and if I can stick to it enough, consider the lifetime subscription because I want to support platforms like these that you can really tell had a lot of care and love put into.
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
I posted a few articles on Substack before, but I do not like how all of them looked the exact same and it feels very newsletter-focused, which is not what I'm looking for. I also felt a weird pressure there.
I posted a few articles there but completely dropped off shortly after I started. I'll probably import some of those articles back here sometime later.
Do you write your posts directly in the editor or in another software?
- I do not write posts directly but use Obsidian. Obsidian is my day-to-day notetaker and I use it for everything. It's somewhat of a PKMS, and also my word-processor. I copy and paste my text from Obsidian to the editor, and I'll format things in Markdown in Obsidian itself as I can preview things there too.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
- When I feel excited about something, or when I feel like I just have to share my thoughts. This mostly applies to journalling but I can see it extending to my blogging behaviour too.
Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
- I publish immediately! As this is a place for me to just share whatever I want, I don't want to put too much pressure on thinking whether things fit a theme or reflect an image of myself.
Your favorite post on your blog?
I like this one where I wrote about my experience with music during COVID, and how I started making a playlist a year to make a sort of time capsule for myself. I share some tracks on the playlists there, as well as some memories surrounding them. It's pretty personal, and was mostly a journalling-type-of-thing for myself.
My blog is pretty new, so it'd probably change!
Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.?
I would like to try to keep my blog as minimal as possible, and only add/customize when I really have to! I'm using one of the offered themes, but I might try changing fonts/color schemes in the future.
Regarding tags, I haven't really thought of it just yet but I would probably try to list down some categories before I start using them and adding them to the previous posts. But yes, it would be a good start to organizing posts.
I would also love to get a search feature added, like how Yordi does it here. I haven't tried it out yet but this seems like a cool way to look for things without going through lists/filters!
If you haven't done this challenge yet, I'm tagging you! Happy writing!
Thank you for reading, and if you would like to share any thoughts or if you have any questions at all, feel free to leave a comment :)
[5/100] for #100DaysToOffload