I should get a blog

It has been 6 months since I opened this blog. 6 months without a single post. 6 months during which I considered that silence was better than bad writing.

I opened this blog 6 months ago. And since this time ? Not a single published post. I did not expect this.

Actually, that is pretty interesting. Before opening this blog, I thought many times “I should totally get a blog to write interesting blog posts” : I wanted to write an article about this cool php trick, I wanted to talk about that library I really like, or I wanted to share my opinion about a trend in a domain I am interested in. I had plenty things I wanted to share my opinion about and I was sure once I would have a blog these posts were going to be written.

Now I got a blog and my digital mouth remains shut. That is not what I expected, but it is definitely an interesting phenomenon.

I tried a few times writing blog posts. About a php tool I love (deployer by the way), about buzzy articles like “PHP is dead”, or about codestyle useful practices.

But for each of them, I chose in the end not publish it. The reason why I decided not to release these posts is I thought they were not good enough. Either it was a topic that someone else already covered and I thought he did a great job at it or I thought that the topic was not interesting enough (for people to read). Sometimes I also wanted to write about a library or a tool but I realized my knowledge of it was not enough to be sure I was not writing something wrong. When you want to explain something to people, you better be sure you feel confident about the topic.

In the end not a single posts came out so far (until this one, obviously).

The cool thing is I learned a lot about this ‘mute time’:

I would find myself thinking about whether using this word or not, double-checking that this statement is true, wavering “is it too short ? is it too long ? is it understandable ?”. And let’s not forget all the spell checking.

It is easier to say something than to write it then to show it to everybody. Saying is quick, easily forgotten. What has been written stays and the audience is a lot bigger. This created some pressure for me.

I now think to have found what kind of blog posts I feel confortable writing so blog posts should start popping anytime on this blog now. Stay tuned, folks !