My Online Writing: What I’ve learned so far
In the last few weeks, I wrote 34 articles, and I must say, it was a fantastic experience.
As I’ve written in my about me story on Medium, I’ve always loved reading, and writing was never a negative experience for me (as it might have been for some people back at school). After the first few weeks, I must admit, that I truly enjoy writing!
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| Photo by Sebastian Pereanu on Unsplash |
In this article, I want to tell you a bit about why I began writing online and elaborate on what I’ve learned along the way.
Why I started to write online
Before I started to write, I had been reading a lot.
Reading is great.
You can dive into the minds of great scientists, explore the thoughts of creative minds, and learn new things.
Because of that, I’ve grown especially fond of non-fiction literature in the past few years - not just the typical self-improvement category, but also books and articles covering psychology, economics, and even physics. I also read a lot about entrepreneurship and how to start a business.
Already in 2023, I grew fond of the idea of creating a business on my own - not full-time, but something like a 4-hour start-up. Preferably it would be an online business.
But I was never sure what to start with.
I was waiting for the idea.
I mean, I had many ideas like developing some kind of software, trying out drop-shipping, web-development, …
I wanted to start a business not to create the next big thing like Amazon or Facebook, but to learn how to start a business. By doing this, if I come up with a great idea in the future, I’ll already know how to turn it into a business. Plus, I can use my newfound business skills in my job as a manager.
Then in 2023, I picked up a book by Nicolas Cole about online writing.
I was thrilled.
By writing online and creating my personal blog I would have the opportunity to learn so many things:
- improve my writing (and my English)
- setting up a web page (I mean you don’t need to do that if you are using Medium, but I wanted to do it anyway)
- learn how to offer products online (e.g. templates, …)
- how to deal with copyright (like story-images)
In 2023, I made my website using GitHub pages because I saw some of my coworkers doing the same for their personal web pages. I got my web address and began writing and publishing my first articles.
After I had published my first few articles, I decided to become a Medium member and share my articles via Medium too.
3 personal learnings from writing online
I’ve learned a bunch from writing online, and I want to keep this article short and fun. So, let me share three things I’ve personally figured out along the way.
Writing can be a form of meditation
Writing helps me organize my thoughts. Just the act of putting something into written words makes some problems disappear. In the mind, a problem often feels more significant than it is.
The same goes for ideas.
Ideas are less concrete and solutions are unclear as long as they are in the mind. However, when you write down ideas and reflect on what’s written, solutions often come to light on their own.
To me, writing is a form of mediation.
If I had a stressful day, or I’ve thoughts circling in my mind, writing can be a great outlet.
How to write something others actually want to read
In my time in academia, I read many scientific articles and wrote some too. While these articles have valuable insights, they’re often written in a way that makes reading feel more like work than like pleasure.
This is different for online articles.
Although they often convey interesting findings, they are written in a way optimized for the reader.
I think I didn’t learn that by just writing. I also read many online articles (especially on Medium) to learn and improve my writing. Online articles just have a different type of flow and reading them feels pleasurable.
I still have a long way to go, but when I look at my early articles compared to the recent ones, I think I’ve already improved a bit.
Creating a web page for blogging
My blogging web page wasn’t the first site I ever made. I created a WordPress site for my wedding earlier. I hosted it on a Raspberry Pi, which was a cool project, but it had two downsides:
- Working with WordPress is something you need to enjoy. You don’t have to be a programmer to use it, but you do need to get the hang of WordPress’s content management system. Plus, you’ll spend a good amount of time working on the design. While this might be exciting for some (the design-savvy ones), I wanted my blog to be mainly about writing.
- Running your website demands more effort than using a hosting provider, especially when it comes to keeping everything backed up and secure. For websites with just one page, it might not be a significant issue, but for blogs with many articles—tens or even hundreds—it can become a problem over time.
So with my blog, I wanted to do something different.
I did a lot of research on hosting providers, and there are significant differences among them. Depending on the expected traffic, there are various sizes available. The sizes that fit my project would cost between $3 and $10 per month. So, it’s not super expensive, but it’s not as cheap as the self-hosting I was familiar with.
I was close to finalizing a 3-year deal with one hosting provider, but then I discovered GitHub Pages.
GitHub Pages offers free hosting for static web pages, making it ideal for documenting software projects or hosting a personal blog. Another advantage is that you can use git, just like in software projects, and access one of the best version control systems on the planet.
I decided to go with GitHub for my projects. As for the framework, I opted for Jekyll, a well-documented and free-to-use library. There are also numerous templates available for use in projects.
Thank you for reading! If you want to read more about my writing journey, check out this article.