Several years ago, I started a blog.
At the time, I was a college sophomore looking for internship opportunities. I had just finished my second programming class and had zero experience outside the classroom. The blog was my gambit.
My web development skills were nil (or null if you prefer), but I knew enough to understand that my C++ coursework wouldn’t help. After some quick research, I learned that websites are just a combination of HTML, CSS, and something called jQuery (where would we be without Quora?). With this naive understanding, I forged ahead.
I copied some boilerplate HTML from W3Schools, plagiarized bits of CSS from StackOverflow, and gave up on jQuery (too much hassle). After a couple of weeks, it was finished. I purchased a domain name, set up hosting for $13 a month, and added the URL to my resume. Now it was time to add some content.
While I knew that my posts would eventually need to be formatted in HTML, I feared this constraint might hamper my “creative juices.” To protect my creativity, I typed my posts in a Word document and converted them to HTML once finished.
As you can imagine, this was tedious work. Every section became a <div>, every paragraph became a <p> tag, every link became an <a> tag, and so on. Mustering the drive to write a blog post is hard enough. Turning it into a two-step process was asinine.
I completed just two posts.