Blogging with less pressure

Gina Trapani published her rules for blogging in her post about “Short-form blogging” which reminded me about an anxiety I still seem to have about blogging: if I’m not going to write a really substantive post, I shouldn’t bother. One of her rules is this one:

If it’s a paragraph, it’s a post. Medium-sized content gets short shrift these days. Don’t go long. One or two paragraphs count. Then press publish.

I don’t know why I feel this need to write long posts that are researched, reasoned and detailed but that compulsion has probably ruined many post ideas through my associated procrastination. Perhaps if I just let go on that need to fill a page with my words, blogging would be more integral to my expressive life.

As for the rest of Trapani’s rules, well, I don’t agree with all of them. I have pages with static content and I have a number of plugins in my WordPress installations. I even keep an eye on traffic to my sites (it’s hardly worth mentioning but useful because it tells me what people find more interesting).

Anyway, this post is starting to run on a little so I’ll just end this one off here and save my other thoughts for another, shorter-form blog post.