Starting a new blog at 34 years old

The thought of creating a blog has been on my mind for decades. The last time I had a blog was in high school, and it sucked. But I’m a professional procrastinator. I have to find the perfect combination of a tech stack to build a blog before even starting to do the most important thing - write the damn blog!

Over the years, I’ve created multiple different blogs with no articles on my local machine. But I’ve never gotten them published. I never got past the step of which tech to use, whether it’s Wordpress, Ghost, Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, Nextjs, 11ty, and so on. It also needs to have the best SEO and performance, right? Not to mention what domain name should I use? Should I use my real name or not? So yeah, I’m a blogger who never writes.

I didn’t always want to write. I hated writing when I was in school. Whenever there was a writing assignment handed out to me, I remember trying to have my dad help me with my writing assignments. But as I grew older and developed a habit of reading more books, I’ve come to realize that writing is such an essential skill in life. Writing allows you to express your thinking clearly. Writing is thinking. Write better, think better.

I’ve needed a place to share my thoughts since I deleted all my social media accounts two years ago. Well, of course not Youtube and Reddit, not yet at least. Just Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

I feel that having a blog is like having a home base where you can connect with different people who also have blogs. It feels more intimate, and you can write long posts about yourself and your thoughts. And maybe someone I knew from before would be able to find me again, not on Facebook but on my blog. Or meet someone whom I would never have met without a blog.

But that doesn’t mean I have to start now, right? After all, I’ve already procrastinated for decades, what’s in the hurry? I am still in the middle of figuring out whether I should use Astro, NextJS, or 11ty as my blog engine. And I’m googling the best CMS (Content Management System) to manage my posts.

That’s when I saw the Derek Siver’s nownownow.com site. I have been following the Now movement for quite a while, but now there’s a website that features everyone with a now page! And the Taiwan category only has 10 people. I wish I had seen it earlier, but hey, better today than tomorrow, right? If I build this damn blog right here, right now, and finally email my longtime idol Derek Sivers, I could maybe be #11 or #12 blog on nownownow.com in Taiwan. How cool is that?

So I just bought this domain name for a hefty price of $1700 USD (maybe I will talk about this in another blog post), picked the framework that looked the coolest - Astro, picked a template that fits my wannabe identity as a digital minimalist - AstroPaper, and started writing this blog post. Not bad at all. Great momentum, Alex! Or maybe it’s just because this domain name is so damn expensive that I have to do something about it.

I guess that’s enough for my first blog post, and I’m off to publish my blog! If you happen to see this, then you know I’ve FINALLY succeeded in stepping out on my first step. Otherwise, this is just another .md file living in my computer :)