THE PARTY NEVER STOPS! JOIN THE FUN!! WOOP WOOP!!
Can you believe it?! Well, maybe you can believe it. This website isn’t YOUR baby. You’re just somebody stopping by on the way to PicturesOfWhiteDucks.com, but for me this is a big deal. I purchased the TomWritesAboutStuff.com domain one year ago today! I bought a cheap WordPress.com account, I migrated the desolate, abandoned wasteland that was my old Blogspot website, I realized quickly that WordPress.com sucked, I bought my own hosting, I tweaked and wrote and wrote and tweaked, and here we are. What you see is the culmination of everything I’ve worked very hard on for 365 days. It’s depressing, but it’s mine, and that’s all that matters.
STUFF I LEARNED ALONG THE WAY!
I don’t have time to write about everything
From an outside perspective, I must be absolutely nuts with the new posts. There are stretches where I post something every day for two straight weeks. And yet, I struggle to find the time to fit everything in. Almost all my meager free time is slotted for writing. I stay up late. I squeeze it in between menial tasks at work. Writing is the only thing I want to do, and I still don’t do as much as I want to. Some day I’m going to have to win the lottery and quit my job! That’s the dream.
Promoting is really boring
God is it boring. I gave up on this a while ago, all the Twitter advertising and finding ways to network and Pinterest and SEO and spray-painting my URL on the street at every intersection in the city! It’s dull. I hate it. And I don’t care about that anymore. I’m not here to make money or become famous, I’m here to write about what I want to write about.
SEO ruined the internet
This is a huge one. One year ago I had no idea what SEO was, and as I gathered more and more information about its necessity for traffic growth, I became increasingly disillusioned on its effect on personal websites. I yearn for the young days of the internet, the late ’90s and early ’00s, when stupid kids like me made a bunch of stupid websites for fun, creativity was king, and there was a great chance that your preferred audience would stumble upon your efforts. NOW, to even have a chance, you need to write like a robot in order to please the Google machine. Fuck that. I don’t care enough.
What does the future look like for TomWritesAboutStuff.com?!?!
I dunno! More of the same! I have an endless supply of ideas, almost all of it is cringingly nerdy, and I’m trying my damnedest to get my motivation back for writing about music. Music is the sole reason I rebooted this project in the first place. It was almost TomWritesAboutMusic.com, so it’s odd that it ended up taking a backseat to the comic books. If there’s one thing I really learned, it’s that this whole endeavor has evolved into me just writing what I feel like. If my interests shift over time, so be it. I’ll adapt.
That’s about it. Thank you for reading! Help me celebrate with Laura Ingraham. Lightbulb hamburgers for everyone!
Do you taste that? That’s the taste of success.
Here’s to another 50 years. I hope I don’t die tomorrow, I got too much more to write about. Cheers, y’all.
hi! i just chanced upon your blog from reddit HAHA
your writing is interesting and i like that you write for fun!! i really like to write reviews for fun too, mostly for myself to sort out what i like 🙂
i’m so glad there are other people writing music blogs for fun too! i wasn’t sure if i should put in the effort to write properly, format things nicely and optimise SEO etc. etc., but after seeing your blog i think i might. i still feel that i’m very motivated by external things like comments, maybe doing things for myself and finding motivation intrinsically will be helpful for personal growth
i listen to pretty different music, but i’m always searching for recommendations and your blog has helped in that! will definitely be checking out some of the albums from here
(my current blog is A MESS. maybe i shouldn’t use blogspot but still find a way to do things for free)
Hey, thanks for stopping by! I appreciate all your words and comments, and I’m glad you found some enjoyment from my crazy blog.
I used to have a blogspot, but then I decided to sink some money into a wordpress site to keep myself motivated at the beginning. Personally, I really liked blogspot. There was a ton of modification and personalization that you could do to your page for absolutely no money. WordPress not so much, but you get unlimited freedom with the paid version.
I spent a BUTTLOAD of time formatting, making things look nice, and getting everything to work properly. I’m pretty proud of it. It’s like my own personal corner of the internet just the way I want it, and that’s very fulfilling for me. I think it would be nice to get more visitors and comments, I think we all feel that way. But this blog has become such a part of me that my motivation is 99% internal, and it feels good to just WRITE. God I love writing. I used to write in spiral notebooks when I was a kid, just filling up dozens of them for no one but myself.
Anyway, thank you so much for the comment! My advice is just to do what feels good to you, whether it’s external or internal motivations. As long as you’re happy with what you’re doing and you feel fulfilled, that’s all that matters!