There was an attempt to…blog

(Now there’s a meta title for you.)

For those of you who have read a few of my other posts, you would have spotted a pattern by now; Try a shiny new activity with initial enthusiasm, achieve mixed results, hit a wall and inevitably give up. And so as the gaps between blog entries have grown longer, and the tyranny of the blank page has rendered me bereft of ideas for my next entry, I have found myself yet again metaphorically staring at the high, wide and stony structure in front of me, wondering how (or if) I’m going to get over it this time.

Part of this might be down to the nature of choosing to write online for fun. After spending a long day cooped up in my room staring at a computer, it’s sometimes hard to get enthused about finally getting to spend my free time at the end of the day…cooped up in my room, staring at a different computer. Is this really my idea of quality time?

However, as I’ve alluded to in previous entries, this is not my first rodeo when it comes to blogging. In addition, what I had written about in most of my previous blogs has been practically the same idea I write about now: chronicling my efforts in  trying out new things I was interested in, as some kind of “continual self improvement” concept. Most of these previous blogs were under the same name; “Infinite Iterations” which I thought was oh-so-clever given my day job as Product Manager (and the domain name was available at the time, which was a big plus).

Of course, the Internet never forgets (or is that elephants?) and the ghosts of these past efforts still lay scattered in the dusty corners of the web. If you search long enough,  you can find my entries on micro-blogging (..is this still a thing?) platforms like Tumblr (https://infiniteiterations.tumblr.com/post/27855968150/you-say-potato-i-say-gardening-achievement which was me attempting to take up gardening 9 years ago.  “Micro-blogging” sounded cool, and its very name implied less effort on my part, but I even failed at keeping such a bare-minimum approach going for more than a few weeks.  When I decided to take a slightly different approach last year under my new “Failing at Leisure” moniker,  it wasn’t a complete surprise that when logging into my trusty WordPress account, I found that I was still attempting to peddle the same idea back as recently as 2018, where I managed a whole two posts ( https://infiniteiterations.home.blog/ ) before it was consigned to the great internet trash can.

There were other online writing projects that strayed from the theme; One unfathomably obscure attempt from 2009 was the jauntily titled “Jazz Quest” in which I had an idea of trying to figure out the appeal of the genre by listening to random albums borrowed from the local library. I know what you are thinking – clearly this idea had “runaway internet sensation” and “mass appeal” written all over it. However, when I put up an image of a Sonny Rollins album that I was the subject of my next entry, I received a string of messages from Blogger insinuating I was breaking all sorts of copyright laws and that I should remove the image. I panicked and hastily deleted the whole site. I even managed to weave writing into the day job for a little while by submitting a few articles for my company blog. Eventually it was implied that I should be writing about “features” and “business value” rather than shoehorning in pop culture references for kicks, and so I gave up on that particular aspect of my role.

With all things considered, this latest blog has been a relative success, and maybe it was in part to deciding for a clean slate and finally giving up on my treasured “Infinite Iterations” name that had led to so many failed efforts previously. I still have no clue about how to share my ideas to an even bigger potential audience, or how to keep things fresh and engaging, but in a way that’s not the point of what I’m doing here. It’s just a few silly stories, which should be fun for me to write about.

Sure, I may be not completely on track with my bold claims that I would be posting weekly updates, but after spending these first few weeks of 2022 moping about whether I will run out of ideas, and agonising over words that are ultimately being tossed into the internet void, I am going to keep going with this one. It’s time to scale that wall and see what’s on the other side.