Start a blog or vlog.

“I’m only three months into blogging and already it has been an enormous learning curve. Huge! If you’re a regular reader you will know that I’m a stickler for planning and endless researching. When I made the decision to start blogging, I didn’t take it lightly. I did several months of preparation, developing my website and brand, taking courses, preparing content and images until finally I decided it was now or never and I hit publish on my first posts. Yet despite my best efforts in preparing, there are some things that you really only learn on the job. As a newbie to the blogging world, it’s a bit like visiting a new country. You’re not fluent in the language, all these terms are cropping up and you’re wondering what the heck they mean. You’re not sure what the customs are either – if somebody comments on you blog do you return the favour? I spent most of my first month trying to figure out blogging etiquette and avoid accidentally pissing anyone off.”

“I have to find time and energy to work on my portfolio on top of working full time and alongside whatever else is going on in my life (such as the stress of a pandemic) so I have to be careful not to bite off more than I can chew. I’m trying to learn React in my free time already, and while Gatsby would allow me to practice React and working with static site generators at the same time, that’s also a lot to juggle all at once. [...] And, indeed, while I figured out Hexo in an evening, that evening involved some frustrated Googling to work through errors and understand things the documentation didn’t necessarily spell out. Then when it came to actually customizing instead of just throwing posts into the default theme [...] I struggled a bit, feeling like the documentation often missed the forest for the trees. Once I got the blog up and running [...] The process of creating new posts by dropping in new files with markdown in them and re-generating the site is just as quick and simple as I wanted it to be.”