So here I am paying I don’t even know how much a year for domain registration and reseller hosting and not I’m even using them. And why is that? I’ll tell you why… blogging is hard. Anyone will probably say the same. But honestly, doing anything is hard, relative to doing nothing.
To start something like a blog, it can take overcoming many mental hurdles. First you think about what do you want to talk about. Will anybody care? Will you care if anybody cares? Second what do you want it to look like? After all, a blog is going to be a reflection of yourself. This was my thought process as a web developer anyways. I have tons of mockup screenshots of what my dream blog would look like. For some reason, they never get implemented. And every few months, the process repeats.
“Self, you really should have a blog.”
“Why is that self?”
“Well, you really need to get yourself out there”
“What would you talk about? What would it look like?”
“Good question, lets open up photoshop, muck around for a few days and dwell on it.”
Let’s be honest. Dwelling is synonymous with procrastinating. By not acting on something right now and allowing it to “simmer” you are simply putting it off. And by you, I mean me.
Dwell no longer, here are the answers I self-imposed:
What are you going to write about?
You are going to drop some wisdom on everyone. Wisdom that your 28-year-old bad self has stumbled upon over your 15 year web development experience. Wisdom from living on the south side of Chicago. Wisdom about which pizza and beer are the best ones. Wisdom of how to school your friends in a game of Settlers of Catan or scoring all the coins in New Super Mario Bros. Stuff like that. tl;dr – Everything.
Will anybody care? Maybe. Do I care? Ya, kinda. I should.
What will it look like? It doesn’t matter, I can always change it later. Here is what I did.
- Logged into my web hosting account’s cpanel.
- Went to Fantastico, and installed WordPress.
- Searched for a theme. (I typed in yellow.)
- Found one I liked in the first minute and installed it. This theme isn’t even yellow. It can be customized later.
Everything took a total of 20 minutes to setup. As an aside, I think this theme pretty cool. It changes colors every time you refresh. It is like an old Atari 2600 where you could pull a lever and change the color palate on your game of Combat.
Anyways, content is king right? It’s my hope that over time, the content published here will dictate what the blog will look like and what features it will need. A designer that I admire at 37signals, Ryan Singer @rjs, talks about designing from the inside-out. Focus on your focus first. Don’t spend a week designing your logo, header graphics and navigation only to fill in your content as an afterthought with a 10pt font in a content area 250px wide. Start with the meat and potatoes, and move out from there.
And if you are happy with an already built theme, more power to you. Just remember you can always change it later. At risk of being too wordy, I’ll stop here. Look at you, you’re publishing! If anyone needs help setting up a blog of their own or help with an existing blog, just let me know. Use coupon code: STEVEPBLOG20. 
Phew, so now that this awkward first post is finally out of the way, let’s get started…