Refocusing on This Blog, It’s Purpose, And It’s Future Direction

In Fall of 2015 I created this blog with the purpose of learning how WordPress worked, from the back end and as a user. WordPress to me seemed like it would be the future of content, a future once envisioned in the days of RSS feeds and personal webspaces, brought anew by the rigid policies and content curating of companies like Facebook and Tumblr. The ease of creators and small businesses of using WordPress as a business front didn’t hurt this belief.

As you can tell from my very sporadic updates, this is a project that has for the most part fallen to the wayside. My life switched directions, with me taking a job that requires me to work 12 hour shifts 6 days a week, my refocusing on the health of my family, and trying to get any sort of sleep in between everything that needs to be done.

Lately I’ve decided to put more focus on this blog. Part of this is because it has the best domain name ever, bar none. (I choose it back when I had grand visions of using it for a link shortener. No one uses this anymore; not even me!) Another part of this is a Facebook group I follow, Flav Medeiros’s Side Business Ideas Facebook group, is hosting a 6 week blogging challenge and I am leaning on this man’s business knowledge and blogging history to learn everything I can from it. I personally don’t see this blog as the sort of place people go for anything particular, because this blog’s dedicated niche is me, the user. I share what I feel is interesting, and those things can be very schizophrenic. The upside of this is that it’s my blog and content. The downside is there’s not really a dedicated user for this content, outside of perhaps friends and perhaps those that view this website’s URL from other services I share.

This challenge comes at an interesting time in my life. At 36 years of age, I am starting to put a lot more thought into who I am as an individual and a member of my local and worldwide community. It also comes at a time when I am severely questioning and challenging my use of a lot of social media. As an example, I recently locked 9 years of Facebook posts so that only I could reference them (although I still use the Messenger, and participate in a couple of closed groups.) If ever there was a time to consider a blogging challenge, and to force myself to write in general, now is this time. Plus, always great to have another excuse to neglect my Youtube channel.

I’m not sure where this will go in 6 week’s time, or after. I am taking this course seriously, and in just one week feel that the course is already on its way to encouraging me to at least update this thing on a weekly basis. I will be looking at some things that have been concerns for me for a while as well, such as how this WordPress theme presents itself on most mobile devices (easy to read but hard to interact with) and how it integrates keywords, links, and media. I may also be moving away from the Adsense advertisements (which I chose because they linked well with the Youtube revenue I used to get two years ago) towards other more viable options. Time will tell!