The annoying thing about having a blog is that when I see anyone else’s blog, one thought comes to mind: I wish my blog was like this.

It could be anything. I see it, I appreciate it, and I want to crib it. Often it’s contradictory: in a single day I could see blogs with a modern sans-serif font, a serif font, or something akin to Comic Sans, and I’d want to steal all of them. Hell, this blog is practically we have Bear Blog at home!

It’s not just limited to design choices. My RSS feed reader has recently been flooded in posts from Sal’s Place (not a complaint, I’m loving it!). My takeaway from this? I should relax and be more casual with what I post. God, I even want to steal posting behaviours.

Look, my blog’s alright. It’s amateur, but it gets the job done. Text is readable, the site is fairly responsive, you can navigate it, and there’s an RSS feed. Yet despite all of this, I often feel like I could do more to make my blog better. Kind of.

When I decide to change something on this blog, it generally has to meet the following criteria: Is it valuable, can I easily do it, and does it require maintenance?

There’s a few more caveats to this, but the main one is can I be arsed?

Bye-bye banners

In this case, no, I can’t be arsed.
When I started this blog, I stumbled upon Invisibleup’s blog. I immediately fell in love with their banner images and knew I had to have my own.

When I started out, I loved making them. But with each passing year they felt more like a chore. On the days where I didn’t feel creative, making one was a massive roadblock that got the way posting, especially if I was in a rush. By the end a good chunk of them were phoned in, and I wasn’t proud of them.

After deliberation, I’ve decided to get rid of them to make life easier. It’s not a choice I’m particularly happy about – they certainly added to my blog’s identity – but I couldn’t guarantee a decent level of quality. At least I’ve removed a massive barrier to posting.

Maybe at some point I’ll figure out how to re-enable banners for the posts that had them. I know if I see another blog with banner images, I’ll be pining to bring them back!

Notes?

When thinking about removing banners, I considered having a separate section for simpler posts and notes – then I’d only have to make images for proper blogposts.

It’s a nice thought, having a space to throw trivial stuff at, and I’ve seen it before on another blog (I can’t remember the name, sorry!). But that still presents its own issues: would it get in the way of my normal blog posts? Would it clog up the RSS feed? Would it be ridiculous to have a second RSS feed?

It’s one of those funny life things. I follow people’s feeds because I like what they put out, even the trivial stuff. But if _I_ put out anything trivial..?

Thoughts on the future

The feeling of never being satisfied with my blog is just a fact of life. The hedonic treadmill and social comparison comes for us all. If I never felt it, my blog would still be manually written in HTML and look like an artefact from 2002.

Despite the want to change my blog, I know it’s fine as-is. The core blog-y bits work and all that’s left are visual tweaks, optional features, and maybe some behind-the-scenes things to make posting even simpler. I can abide.

Halfway through writing this post, Case Duckworth said it best: Your sites are fine!
Hey look, his blog post has an afternote! I should start doing afternotes–