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I like my blog. Yet, I don’t love my blog.

Why?

I have thought about it and I think that there are two key reasons why I don’t love my blog anymore:

  1. It does not look visually stunning
  2. It is too high friction

Reason 1: My blog is ugly

This is what my blog looks like right now.

Of course, I don’t really think that my blog is ugly. It looks fine, but it just not look stunning, but I want it to! When people visit my blog I want them to be blown away and have them triggered to read the articles that are on my blog! I want them to feel excited, motivated, and inspired! Currently my visual presentation does not reflect this desire.

Reason 2: It could be lower friction

As it stands right now, writing a post for my blog is a very high-friction activity.

Let’s go through the steps necessary to write a blog post:

  • Make a new .md file in /_posts
  • Copy over the front-matter from another post
  • Change the title, tags, header path in the front-matter
  • Make a new directory in /assets with exactly the same name as the post
  • Put files I want to use in /assets
  • Use HTML tags with <img src="/assets/folder/img.png> to put images in my post

It sounds like I am exaggerating. All these steps in isolation seem minor and quite easy but for me, together, they provide a high level of friction that is stopping me from publishing more.

This is what it looks like writing this post.

Now compare this with Substack. They have managed to make writing so enjoyable and frictionless that I was able to publish 4 posts in less than a week, that is more than my total blog output in 2020 combined!

Conclusion

Please don’t get me wrong, I still like my blog. It’s just that I don’t love it anymore.

And, truth be told, I think that is a fine assessment that anyone should be able to make. Sometimes we need to step back and look critically at what we have made and think to ourselves, “How can we make this better?”

This post is for me. For me, to figure out what I dislike about my blog so I can fix it.

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