The Problems with Blogs

Over the past few years, I have created about three blogs, if you can call them that. It would be more accurate to say that they were attempts at starting blogs. Unfortunately those things always remained lifeless. Even attempting them was a huge waste of time. For me and for whatever poor soul decided to read it. So, you have been warned, don’t expect much over here.

Now that your expectations have been lowered, let’s get rid of dreary disclaimers, and move onto to boring content. The main reason behind my lack of blogging was a normally non-reliable internet connection in my house. This was mostly due to the fact that I was living in Egypt. And even though internet connections have always been a thing in Egypt since the early 90s, people didn’t really embrace it until sometime at the beginning of the 00s. Egyptian kids my age didn’t really get online much until Facebook came around. I never really thought I needed a fast internet connection so I didn’t push my parents to get one. We did have dialup which seemed enough at the time since it fullfilled most of our needs. We never got a reliable internet connection until about 2008 (yes, 2008) when I moved to Canada for school and we needed to use Skype. Since then, my family has caught up with the rest of the world. I’m happy to say that my family has developed a good addiction to the internet. Which means I can’t use crappy internet as an excuse.

My first blog post ever was sometime in 2005 on blogger. Nothing came out of that, mostly because the internet issue but partially also because I didn’t have much to say at the time. As anybody reading this can see, that is still something I struggle with until now. I later tried out tumblr, no dice. Thinking that I might have at least 140 characters worth, I got on twitter. Still nothing. I guess I’m just not the most interesting person. I’ve just spent all this time convincing you that I’m not good at blogging. So what is happening here? Another exercise in futility? Maybe –probably– though I hope not.

I’ve decided that the reason why I didn’t end up writing much of anything is that I couldn’t control the content of my blog fully. As far as I know, free accounts on tumblr, blogger, wordpress, etc. don’t offer much customizability. I like to be able to to control how things appear. Of course, this can be done by buying some hosting somewhere and hosting your own website. But that is too much work. You see I wanted to do everything by myself but I didn’t want to do everything by myself. This included things like setting up something like a wordpress instance which involves a whole bunch of web development crap, and learning html and js. I did try to do these things, but I’m just not smart enough to quickly learn all these things quickly and build a website.

So I continued quietly chastise myself for being cheap and a little lazy, and resumed my blogless existence. Some time ago, about six months before this post I think, I started to come accross quite a few solutions around that were catering to people like me. Things like flask, jekyll, or ruhoh. These are all great, but we still have the hosting problem. Can’t a guy reach an audience of potentially millions for free? Well, thanks to github, a guy now can. Using jekyll-bootstrap. I don’t know how it works, but it does, so here I am.

Ever since a young age, I have been interested in writing. Once upon a time, I fancied myself a literary genius. I’ve since learnt that I am quite the opposite, a literary dunce. My goal with this blog is to scratch that creative itch. I have to write quite a few scientific reports for school and work. It’s not like I don’t write at all. But writing something is easy, making it interesting and understandable to a wide audience is an art. An art I would like to learn. I will try to write as much as possible here to that end. Somebody might find it interesting, but this blog will be mostly for me.