[byte 1] deadlines are important

Deadlines are important.

Frankly, I’ve been treating this place with zero respect. When I first started this blog I had high hopes of posting frequently with all types of content: tutorials, game devlogs, reviews, and any topics I found interesting. Because it was a personal project, I believed the freedom from deadlines would motivate me to have a high level of creativity. Essentially creating a self-perpetuating loop of creativity. However, without the discipline to finish a project—blog post— from start to finish in a reasonable timeframe, I found myself drowning in the direction of this place.

The website was designed to be a space where I could grow my personal brand. From everything I read online, I thought I had this in the bag. So many people around me have been able to execute side-projects from start to finish, and some were even able to find something that clicked with the larger internet and exploded in popularity (relatively).

I like guides and indie games, so I can just create guides and reviews, target SEO keywords, and grow engagement! - Jason’s naive thoughts

This idea partially worked, but my issue is that I felt that I didn’t have enough experience to be the source of truth for that type of content going forward. The perfectionist in me wanted to write every. single. detail. in the tutorials, but that ended up forcing me to do several days worth of research to write a single blog post. Not sustainable.

In the final months of my previous job, I was tasked with maintaining the blog. Part of the duties of managing a blog are to leverage SEO techniques, both technical and writing, to bring in traffic. I met with several SEO gurus to learn their ways. I had access to all types of technical SEO tools to research keywords, long-tail keywords, see what’s trending, etc. With that knowledge, I tried to apply that to my last couple of blog posts.

Writing content to appease the search engines (and now AI chatbots) feels soulless. Personally, I’m tired of what the internet has become with AI-written SEO slop articles. AI can be a powerful tool to have in one’s toolbelt, but I feel it shouldn’t be used anywhere near creative projects. Whilst having this SEO knowledge helped me write and execute some posts, the resulting posts never fulfilled me.

As I’m sure you can tell, judging by the six months that have passed since I posted about starting fresh on this blog. I wasn’t happy with the state of this site, every time I loaded up my page I had to click away,

In those six months, I came to loathe my previous tag line of “Tech, Guides, and Reviews”. It made me feel fake. During my break, I’ve been reflecting on what this website is and what I want it to be. I found that I want this website to simply be my personal space on the internet. I don’t care if this blog pops off, or if I’m the only reader/writer. I want a place to post my thoughts and resources without having to rely on existing platforms.

Circling back to the start of the post, I’m exercising my self-discipline to build a habit of a weekly blog post— the Byte series.

Each post in the Byte series will be me talking about a topic I find interesting, or something that happened that week. My hope is that these weekly posts will help exercise my writing muscle and get me out of the rut of overthinking.

Anyways, that’s all I have on my mind this week.
Cheers,
Jason