Personal

Voice behind the blog

| Vasily Belolapotkov
Photo by Dmitry Demidov on Pexels.com
Audio recording of this post

I’m pretty new to blogging but what I like about it so far is that it’s a great way of sharing an individual perception of reality. That’s why I think the author’s identity is an essential part of the blog. That’s why many blogs have an “About” page and it’s a great way of getting familiar a bit with the author of the posts you read and hopefully enjoy.

Another great thing about people is they are very different and creative by nature and that applies to their blogs and about pages as well. However, so far I’ve seen only text and images as the most common content on the about page, mine about page is not exclusion. That’s perfectly fine, especially if you like me have the good old stereotype that “blogging is writing and writing is text and images”. However, Blogging for beginners course by WordPress.com Courses and folks at Automattic, challenged that setting in my head, and I realized it’s not like that anymore. Somehow my brain ignored the fact that video-based services like YouTube, Instagram (to some extent), Tik-Tok, and so on have millions of content creators who are bloggers. Podcasts became very popular too and can be considered voice-based blogging! So why not use voice, audio, and video in the classical web-based blog?! Why not use other media in addition to text and image on the About page to share your identity with readers and establish a better connection?! I don’t have a good answer for you 😛

So here we are, got to the point and the key purpose of this post – to connect the dots and give you a chance to hear the voice behind the blog. I don’t know yet if I’ll make audio recordings of the following posts, but I smile every time when I imagine how my voice sounds in your head while you read the posts.

Thanks for listening/reading and hope you’re not annoyed by the voice 🙂

Baby steps in blogging: four weeks

| Vasily Belolapotkov
Photo by Lachlan Ross on Pexels.com

I’ve started my blogging experiment four weeks ago (a couple of weeks before publishing the experiment post). This is a quick recap of how things are going on so far.

Experiment vision is still valid, which is great 🙂 

I spend 30 mins every day on blogging activities, including weekends and vacation days. There were a couple of busy days when I skipped blogging and compensated on the next day, so it’s more of 30 mins/day on average now, but still fine to me.

I’m writing regularly and publish one post weekly for 3 weeks in a row! I noticed there are days when it’s harder to write and thoughts are not willing to shape into a nice story, but that’s fine too. It would be naive to expect writing goes smoothly any day no matter what’s going on around you. 

I’ve started reading more blogs but I don’t track how many. So it’s hard to say where I am compared to the target of one post per day, but my gut feeling says I’m behind and can do better. Anyway, I enjoyed some posts and subscribed to a couple of blogs. Love this one by Paolo in particular.

I’ve published my first book review post which was holding me from reading new books. Now I started reading a new book and very much enjoy both its contents and the fact I’m reading again 🤓

I’ve started Blogging for beginners course and slowly learn new things when not writing. After a couple of modules, it already gave me a few interesting ideas and thoughts. 

Last but not least I’ve migrated my old site to WordPress.com and can focus on writing now. I had a few challenges during the migration and have some ideas for improvements in the onboarding process, but haven’t shared them with internal teams at Automattic yet.

This is where I am now after the first 28 days baby steps in blogging. I’m happy with the progress and curious to see the results at the next milestone of 90 days.

My blogging experiment

| Vasily Belolapotkov
Photo by RF._.studio on Pexels.com

TLDR; This is my second attempt to start blogging on a regular basis, but this time it’s more about writing and creating content for the audience rather than building a personal blog with fancy frameworks for developers. Keep reading for more details and ideas behind this blogging experiment.

Story & history

I’ve never considered myself an outstanding writer and was admired by all those people creating and publishing content over the internet. Often I thought “I’m not smart enough”, “I don’t have anything outstanding to share”, or “everybody knows this, so why would I publish the same”. However, with time I’ve noticed, there is a lot of overlapping content, found some posts describing the fears of beginner writers and got other positive signals that encouraged me to start. And I started, but (there is always some but in the good stories) it didn’t work out 😄 Here is what I did wrong the first time – I tried to do two big things at once: build a custom blog from scratch with a modern framework (that deserves its own story) and create content. Both required reasonable time, effort, and knowledge I didn’t have, so I stuck pretty soon and abandoned this idea.

These days I’m proudly working at Automattic – the company has a common history with WordPress and develops many other great products for the web. I write a lot internally and improved my writing skills significantly over the last months so the idea of getting back to blogging has been revolving in my head for a while. Luckily I came across an internal post about a blogging group, read a few posts and stories from other Automatticians about their journey in blogging, got inspired and come with an idea of my own blogging experiment.

My 5 whys

The purpose of the initiative is of large importance for me, that’s why I want to be clear about why I’m going to do anything. Here are my whys for this experiment:

  1. I got curious about the blogging world and the technology driving it. There are lots of tools and practices helping people to deliver useful content to the audience and I’d like to learn them.
  2. Automattic creates lots of great products but there is always room for improvement, so by using our own products as a customer I’ll be able to provide valuable feedback to internal teams and make publishing on the web even better.
  3. I want to join the community of bloggers and hopefully make some new connections across the globe.
  4. Share my knowledge, thoughts, and experiences with readers at the highest quality I’m able to provide.
  5. I’m curious how far I can get in the long term doing baby steps every single day.

Experiment

Here are few words about my vision of experiment:

  1. I’ll spend at least 30 mins/day creating: writing posts, learning, doing backstage tasks (need to learn them first).
  2. My target is to write at least 1 post/week.
  3. Reading other blogs is also learning, so I’m aiming to read at least one blog post per day (on average). Maybe will read several posts but not every day.
  4. Experiment duration: at least 1 year. Until September 6, 2022.

That’s it, very simple, isn’t it? But looks challenging enough to me 🙂

What I’m going to write about?

That’s a great question! At the moment the plan is to write about something close to me like software development, leadership in IT, book reviews, and some personal stuff and thoughts. But who knows where this blogging journey will lead me to.

Follow the blog for more content! At the moment I think only authorized WordPress.com users can subscribe and follow it, but hopefully, I’ll find a way to improve it soon so anybody interested will be able to subscribe via email and other media. Stay tuned and have fun!