Photo author: Vermin Inc

…give up? No, you try and try again (and for me this is the second “again”).

I’m one of those people that used to write blogs but for various reasons gave up. First there was a tech/gadget “blog” (it used a CMS called e107 instead of WordPress) I wrote as a senior in high-school. Then there was a t-shirt blog I started called SickHabits. Day in, day out I posted what I thought was interesting, nearly ground-breaking (let’s be honest here, I’m not dellusional) content about the subject, mixed it with my own opinions and thoughts. I soon realized it wasn’t really like that.

So what went wrong?

First off, when I started writing my first “blog”, the one based on the e107 CMS almost 4 years ago I wasn’t aware of what a blog really meant or, as a matter of fact, of the existance of WordPress. But somehow it ended up being just that: a blog. Mind you, a horribly crippled one at that, with some sloppy modifications I had made to a rather unrefined code to begin with, and a horrible theme I had modified to suit what I thought were my needs. Fast-forward about 4-5 months and I find myself thinking “This sucks, there has to be a better system than this!”. But still I didn’t know what the hell WordPress was.

This, combined with the ever growing feeling that all the posts I wrote resembled some mindless show-and-tell made me lose interest in my first blog’s topic so I finally pulled the plug and shut it all down.

Then along came WordPress, with sleek plugins and a seemingly endless variety of themes and this re-sparked my interest in blogging. So I picked a niche with a large, like-minded audience and gave it a go. The topic was T-shirts and at first I had fun reviewing lots of designs from various shops and artists. Then after a while I once again sunk in a routine, posting a lot of “convenient” (read: lazy) content: every week I did a post or two about the new shirts on Threadless and more on some other t-shirt shop I got new product newsletters from (there were quite a few…). Finally I realized this is the same kind of show-and-tell of other people’s products nonsense I was posting on my first blog. It dragged on for a bit and then I mothballed this blog as well. I still own the domain though and I’m planning on reactivating it someday. Soon.

But for now I’m hard at work with this new home of mine on the internet, RollingMarbles.com. Still a lot of interface and back end tweaks, adaptations or full-out hacks to be made until I’m pleased with it. Which gives me an idea for an upcoming series: how I tweaked the raw, unpolished standard WP install into something welcoming for my visitors and easy for myself to use.