Welcome to the Eldritch Blog

For the longest time I have wanted to write my own blog. I wanted a place where I could share my thoughts, my experiences and my personal projects.

It isn’t difficult to have a blog these days. We are spoiled for choice even at the free tier. Despite all the fantastic options available, I knew that I wanted to develop and host the site myself.

The Pattern

I have started the process a few times in the past, using it as an excuse to learn new web development tools like Svelte. Each of those efforts fizzled out as I got distracted with other projects, games or responsibilities. My GitHub account is littered with a number of these false starts.

This time, I started with the same set of bad behaviors. I was inspired by a fantastic blog post by Matt Fantinel. So here I was working on another Svelte blog using the MDsveX library. I was learning a lot about Svelte, MDsveX and the remark and rehype ecosystem. I even wrote my own rehype plugins to build linkable headers and a table of contents.

The Blocker

While I was learning a lot about the development of a blog, there was something I wasn’t doing. I wasn’t writing a blog. Deep in development, I took a pause and evaluated why I wasn’t writing the blog. The more I started to think on it, the more the reasons became obvious.

No one is going to want to read this blog.

It is difficult to want to spend your limited time on a project when you are not convinced of its value. I was finding value in learning how to develop the blog but I was uncertain if blogging would actually be worth the effort.

You don’t have anything to say.

Thoughts and opinions are everywhere these days. Sometimes it can feel like your thoughts and opinions are just a drop in the ocean. What can you say that hasn’t already been said?

The Reframing

Now that I had identified why I wasn’t writing, I needed to change my perspective.

Who are you writing this blog for?

I said it at the beginning. I wanted a place to share my thoughts, my experiences and my personal projects. The value of writing the blog is in the act itself, not in the observation or recognition. If you’re reading this, I’m happy you are here and I hope you take away something of value but this blog was always for me.

Your perspective is unique to you.

Sure, others might have said it first and they might have said it better. That doesn’t mean that you have nothing to say or nothing to add. For someone out there, it might be through you that they are exposed to an idea for the first time, even if it isn’t new. There is value in that.

The Result

So, here we are. If you’re reading this then it means I finally posted this blog. I’m sure it isn’t perfect but it never had to be. I hope you, you who I doubted would ever read this blog, have learned something from my past hangups.

In a future post I’d like to talk about why and how I switched to developing the site with Hugo.