Walter Starts a Blog
Making helpful, nice looking things is my livelihood, so allowing perfect to get in the way of good is something I often struggle with. There’s also a lot more available on the web (both good and bad) than there used to be, and I don’t want to add to the noise unless I think it would serve someone other than myself. All this to say, folks have wanted me to start blogging again for a while, but I’ve really taken my time getting back into it.
There are a lot of decisions that go into a blog, ranging from small ones (like how to format times and dates) to large ones (like what the blog will be called.) And it’s surprising how many of even the small decisions turn out to be big, far-reaching decisions that would prove to be huge nuisances to revise later.
For example, what to call it, and where will it reside. Because this is a personal blog it feels inauthentic to try to pass it off as more by giving it a name like “Back to the Drawing Board” with a lengthy url ending in .info because someone’s squatting on .com. On the other hand, there’s an implied lack of consideration if it’s just called “Walter Coots’s Blog”. And hey, shouldn’t people be able to easily check out my portfolio from by blog? Should they just be parts of the same site? Or perhaps their purposes and audiences are different enough that they just muddy each other.
By this point, I’ve started considering whether getting walters.blog for $280 / year is worth it to have a clownish (but admittedly memorable) vanity domain extension. I’m already overwhelmed, and so far I haven’t even mentioned the questions on content, design, coding, hosting, tying the blog to social channels, and whether or not to have advertisers. It’s no wonder everyone just uses Medium and Substack. But I can be a stubborn control freak, and I want to be the master of my own content, so a the decision for this blog to be custom has been an easy one.
For anyone else looking to start a blog, here were the major questions getting in my way and how I finally answered them.
What’s it Called?
Walter Coot’s Blog. But I’ve gone out of my way to avoid highlighting this because I think it sounds perfunctory, which is off-brand for me. If I ever thought there would be any authors other than myself, I would have tried to decouple the name from myself, but that’s not the case. This is one of many scenarios where having an unusual name works to my advantage.
Where’s it Hosted?
blog.waltercoots.com. I didn’t want to bother with registering and maintaining another domain name, and short of it not being a subdomain (which I’d rather have my portfolio be for now) this is as good as it gets.
What sort of content will it cover?
This was something I waffled a lot on. I like learning and writing about tons of stuff, but my fear is there wouldn’t be enough overlap in audiences. People who’d be interested to read about video games may not care about what I have to say about the Ship of Theseus, and working to strike an equal balance on all the different fascinations I have sounds exhausting. I had to go back to why I was doing all this, and design was the most appropriate topic to hone in on. But please reach out to me about video games and thought experiments.
Will my portfolio and blog cross-reference? Will they share the same navigation?
The navigation will not be shared. The portfolio will have a link to the blog in its main navigation. The blog will have a link to the portfolio from the About page. As its own creation, the blog could be considered a part of the portfolio, or at least a feather in my cap professionally, but the portfolio is definitely not a section of the blog, and I don’t anticipate the blog’s audience regularly looking for my portfolio.
Will it have advertisements?
No. I’m not doing this to make money. But I may showcase things I love just because I think they’re great and want to share them with people.
What platform will run the blog?
This was another thing I spent too much time thinking about. WordPress was the obvious answer, but it would come with a set of challenges that could overcomplicate things. I toyed with similar alternatives, rolling my own simple CMS, and even trying something serverless, but eventually came back to WordPress. Then I thought about writing my own frontend since WordPress has a REST API, and I even experimented with creating a custom frontend in Vue, but the amount of functionality I was recreating outweighed the utility of having a custom frontend so I just decided to go back to plain old WordPress, warts and all. This was all so stupid and annoying!
How will it be promoted?
I plan to share new posts on Facebook, Mastadon, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Twitter. These will be my own account, not some separate “Walter Coots’s Blog” page. This also necessities me making my accounts public again. Since I want strangers to hear about the blog, it’s either separate accounts or public accounts, and I think public is less of a headache to manage. My real hope is that folks still use RSS readers, and I’ll have a feed available for that, but I suspect it’s something only nerds like myself mess with. I suppose I should also allow email subscriptions, too.
How will it look?
What you’re seeing is what I got. As much as I’d love for my blog to be a major flex, the content is what I need to focus on. The blogs I admire most keep the content front and center, and the places I spend the most time reading have the fewest accents and distractions between me and what I’m trying to absorb. I’m just emulating that.
Now that these are all spelled out, it sure seems like they were easy and straightforward to answer. But I fussed over all of them for years. For instance The Deck was an ad platform I admired and considered designing around the possibility of using, and they shut down 6 years ago.
It may sound like I regret delaying this long, but I don’t. Between social media platforms lowering the effort to participate, and our 24 hour news cycle, the web has become a gushing firehose of content where anyone in the world can contribute. I don’t want to add to the conversation for the sake of adding to it, I want it to make a difference.