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As you may have noticed, there hasn’t been much activity on this blog recently. My last posting was about three weeks ago, after a five month period of regular posting, which averaged 2-3 posts per week. I reached 40 posts, and hit the proverbial brick wall, so I’ve been taking a breather, recharging the old batteries, and considering what to do next.

A major part of the problem is that I’ve started blogging at the most troubled period of my life, when I’m psychologically ill-equipped to handle the stress and dedication needed for regular posting. My teenage son died a year and a half ago this week, and I’m still finding it an almost impossible task to cope with the loss or even to really accept that he’s dead. I suffer from rollercoaster mood swings and almost omnipresent bouts of severe depression (things I had never really experienced before, to any large degree), and I’ve been in the middle of the biggest Mama of a depression for over a month now.

The result has been a complete loss of interest in pretty much everything, including blogging. The constant posting became a chore, the inspiration and ideas dried up, and everything came to a grinding halt. After this short break, I’m now trying to get myself together to begin posting again…

…or not. I’ve been using the break to think over what I’m going to do next. Starting the blog in the first place was a flash decision, right out of the blue. Up until five minutes before I installed Wordpress, I’d never even considered blogging. I’d always been focused on hand-coding a traditional website, but had been messing around for ages without actually getting anything online. I was up and making my first posting ten minutes after installing Wordpress. So setting up a blog has enabled me to get online quickly, after years of procrastination.

But I still don’t really know if blogging is for me. The constant need for regular posting “x” times per week, even when the ideas dry up or I just couldn’t be bothered, the worry over comments, or the lack of them. Do I even need all of this? Was my long-term preference for a traditional static site (putting up pages as and when I feel like it, concentrating on well-researched articles rather than more casual conversational postings) the correct choice for me, and setting up a blog a flash-in-the-pan that merely served to kick-start my online presence? Or is there a place for both static website and blog in my future plans?

A major part of my problem is that I started as a hand-coder, and it’s made me a real control freak. I’d describe myself as an advanced html coder, and beginner-to-intermediate at css, but learning fast. I know absolutely nothing about javascript, or about PHP or any other form of server-side programming, nor am I particularly inclined to take the trouble to learn any of this stuff. It seems like complete overkill for the site that I want to maintain. Personally I think that html and css are enough for my needs, and learning both through hand-coding may be slow and laborious, but it is thorough. And I prefer the control I have of every minute aspect of the coding and the layout of the website’s directory structure.

As a newbie blogger, I feel that I’ve lost that control. Wordpress handles all the coding and site layout, and while this may be convenient for getting posts online quickly and easily, it is a lot less useful for helping me learn all the intricate elements of hand-coding. It’s taken the control of every last little aspect of the site and individual page design away from me. To regain that same level of control, I’d have to learn Wordpress inside out, and quite a lot about PHP to go with it. And I honestly don’t know if it’s worth the trouble, especially for the site I have planned, which will be made up of a large number of static pages, and only a couple of pages where the content changes regularly (a news page and an editorial page), something I could probably do manually anyway.

So it’s a time for reconsidering my options. Do I continue as I am with the same blog and hope that I pick up enough about Wordpress and PHP to become more of an “expert”? Do I keep the blog as the “main” hub of the website, and the rest as add on static webpages? Do I shift over mainly to a static website, and relegate the blog to a small part of the site? Or do I drop the blog altogether, and concentrate solely on a static website? To be honest, I still haven’t made up my mind, so there’s a lot of serious thinking ahead.

Choices, choices…

Phil