I started this blog in 2016. More than six years now. But if you check my stats page, you'll see that the number of posts started declining fairly quickly, since 2018.
I finally decided to stop this downward trend and to remember why I started writing in the first place.
Why I started writing
For the joy of small projects.
Basically I was just keeping a log of the things I've been working on. Also, when I encountered a problem, I would document it. Mainly to make sure I don't forget about it, and if someone finds it useful, even better.
I didn't worry about the number of visits, "building a brand" or anything along those lines. This is how this blog used to look like:
Screenshot of my blog from 2017."Popularity" affected my joy of writing
At some point I tried writing a little longer, more educative posts. One of them caught eye of the community and it exploded. It appeared on Hacker News, Reddit and multiple front-end oriented websites. Honestly, it felt great!
There was an insane spike in my analytics, and when it stabilized I had way more visits then before. Then people and companies started contacting me about putting up their ads and doing sponsored posts (I always hated how even the term tries to disguise the real purpose - advertising.) . I never intended to do this, so I turned all of these offers down.
Everyone around me started talking how great it is that I'm building my own "brand". How I should create a newsletter and increase conversion. I was a little bit confused, but it still felt good.
"Building a brand"
With all this attention, I tried to maintain quality and write better, more professional posts. I felt like there were expectations and that there will be more people judging my writing.
I would write a post and feel like it wasn't good or professional enough and just scrape it. For that reason I never wrote about some projects that I'm super excited and proud about (for example Vertigo or Retro Frame). Writing is hard enough as it is (Especially in a foreign language) , and this newly added pressure made it even harder.
It ended up feeling like a rat race and it literally took all of the joy out of writing and sharing my projects. Number of posts kept declining. In 2021 it fell down to a record low of only four posts.
I finally realized that I don't really care about this brand nonsense and that I need to do what makes me happy instead. If that content still gets me some traction, then that is the brand I'll be thrilled to keep building.
What's next
It is time to get back to the roots. I'll write about things I'm excited about and share my projects and passions. Writing short posts is fine as well. I'll do it when I feel like writing, instead of just trying to get any content out of the door. This blog was never about money nor brand, and I'll never put ads nor do sponsored posts.
Hopefully, with me writing about the things I love, the number of posts will organically start to grow again.
This blog was created for the joy of small projects, and I got sidetracked, but now I'm taking it back where it should be.