Hone Your Tech Skills through Blogging
One of the things that blogging will help you do is improve your technical skills. A great number of writers tend to be luddites, despite modern innovations. This is a trend borne out by the types of products that companies tend to try to sell to writers. If you’ve ever seen one of those “retro typewriter” products that attempts to lure you in by paying too much for a clicky keyboard and a rudimentary user interface that doesn’t do anything else, you’ve fallen prey to this. There’s no shame in it. As writers, we like what we like, and there will always be a streak in us that yearns for a simpler time, tapping away at a mechanical keyboard.
This is where blogging can help nudge you, rather than drag you, into the modern era with a minimum of kicking and screaming. Now, dedicated blogging sites are already considered “old tech” if not obsolete, but there are still a few of us around who remember writing websites in HTML in notepad (and then viewing them in Netscape Navigator). There was a time when people wrote websites by hand and even created frames (another obsolete piece of HTML design that you still run into on the Web). You don’t need to worry about any of that. This is because these days, almost anything you need to do is already being handled by content management systems.
“Don’t try to plan everything out to the very last detail. I’m a big believer in just getting it out there: create a minimal viable product or website, launch it, and get feedback.” – Neil Patel
WordPress, an incredibly common piece of software, powers a lot of blogs today. It’s versatile, highly configurable, and easy to use. Most significantly, though, one of the authors I know who writes for multiple clients has worked extensively in WordPress… without ever having a single minute of training in it. He’s taught himself how to use it because the interface is fairly intuitive. If you don’t mind messing around a little, you can find all kinds of bells and whistles, including modifying and customizing templates for use in WordPress.
Anything you don’t know can usually be found out using a Google search. Yes, there are consequences for playing with the “back end” of technology you don’t fully understand, but in the day and age of website backup utilities, with just a little pre-planning you won’t get yourself into too much trouble.
That’s just one example. My point is that blogging regularly will prompt you to interact with a content management system, like as not. When you do this, the more you do it, the more familiar you will start to become with the little technical details. These are things like, “How do I make this menu appear? How do I put a thumbnail image in my post? How do I attach that image in the post itself? How do I do a call-out quote?”
After you’ve asked and answered these questions, you’ll slowly and surely become more technically savvy as you blog. The more you do, the better you’ll get. This is the best way to become more technically adept: through exposure and self-paced, self-directed learning. When you are solving problems, you’ll remember the answers, and your need to blog consistently will mean a continuous exposure to technology.
Now, for some of you reading this, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. You’re already operating at a high level of technical skill. For everyone else who finds comfort in being a luddite, however, this will mean a lot. The more you blog, the better you’ll get with the technical side, even if you aren’t trying to do so. The writing is what matters… but the bells and whistles, the technical side of things, also matter. Don’t neglect them.