Summary

The author launched a personal blog, alexphili.com, despite it being unpolished, to document their 100 days of writing challenge and emphasize the importance of taking action over perfectionism.

Abstract

The author, Alex Philips, recently embarked on a 100 days of writing challenge and decided to create a personal blog to share their journey, despite the blog's initial "messy" state. The rush to launch was driven by the desire to own a platform independent of Medium, where the author also publishes content. The blog, alexphili.com, was set up with essential features like domain purchase and WordPress installation, but lacked basic pages and functional links. The author acknowledges the site's flaws but prioritizes action and learning over waiting for perfection. They advocate for cross-posting between one's own blog and Medium, using Medium's import feature to avoid content duplication issues. The author reflects on past attempts at blogging that failed due to perfectionism and celebrates the progress made by launching this imperfect version, planning to discuss the benefits of "messy productivity" in future posts.

Opinions

The author believes in the value of taking immediate action and learning by doing, even if the result is not perfect.
They express that the fear of an amateurish appearance should not prevent one from starting a project.
The author emphasizes the importance of owning one's content platform to mitigate the risks associated with relying solely on third-party platforms like Medium.
They suggest that an initial lack of audience should not deter one from launching a blog, as the primary goal is to create and share valuable content.
The author points out that cross-posting content from a personal blog to Medium is a safe practice when done correctly, using Medium's import feature to reference the original article.
They admit to past failures in blogging due to a pursuit of perfection and now advocate for the significance of making tangible progress, even if it means starting with an imperfect product.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Why I Created an Embarrassingly Messy Blog

And what to learn about it

Have you ever been embarrassed in public? What an awful feeling right?

That’s a bit what I felt yesterday, as I published an article on a brand new blog I created, that looked embarrassingly messy.

Why did I not wait to publish until it was polished and ready for visitors?

That’s the question I will answer in this article.

And I hope it can inspire you.

So embarrassing!

So yesterday, I took massive action:

I bought my own domain: alexphili.com
Bought a hosting package
Installed and configured WordPress to run my brand new blog
And posted an article on it

I did my best to configure a few things, but the result was far from optimal:

The home page was blank
There was no “About” or “Contact” page yet.
And many links were not functional.

Worse: I still haven’t taken the time to fix these flaws, and it will probably stay like that for a couple of days (please be patient).

A phantom audience

Now you may say:

“Are you not ashamed to show a faulty blog to visitors and look amateurish?“

First, let’s put things in context. Many times, when creating a website, we imagine people from Google will swarm to our site.

But in practice, it’s not the case. Right now, I’m confident there is about zero visitor on this website.

And even if a couple of unsuspecting visitors go to my blog, they will still be able to read that first article I published, which will hopefully bring value to them.

Why I created this blog?

You might not know it, but I recently engaged in a challenge named 100 days of writing.

I’m very excited by this challenge and plan to do it seriously.

But this is a big sacrifice on my spare time, and I want to make this investment as valuable as possible.

Since I discovered Medium a few weeks ago, I have really enjoyed its vibrant community and the tools it puts in our hands.

But Medium is an independent platform, which means — god forbid — they could take my content hostage any time if they want, or they might get bankrupt because of a lack of funding.

That’s why I believe it’s best to have my own platform, and post my articles both on Medium and my blog.

This is called cross-posting.

Posting to Medium from my own website

You might think cross-posting is a bad practice as Google would flag my articles as duplicated content.

But Medium has a mechanism to point to the original article. So it’s pretty safe to do it.

I struggled a bit yesterday to figure out how to do it, but there’s a very easy way to do it.

You simply go to the address: “https://medium.com/p/import", enter the address of your original article, and Medium will publish it with a link to your original article.

Note that you will have a chance to edit your article a bit before publishing the story, which is essential, as you will need to format the article correctly.

Taking action matters

Now you know why I rushed to create an imperfect blog.

As you see, I have cut to the chase, and taken action without bothering too much about crafting the perfect website.

But the story was different six months ago. Back in august 2021, I was busy publishing threads on twitter. And I wanted to create a blog to elaborate on my ideas.

Back then I wanted to do things in order, so I created a launch page with a count down, and I set up a form to collect my first newsletter subscribers.

The result? Nothing! The blog never launched.

At the time, I explained this was because I had too few newsletter subscribers. But perfectionism was probably a factor in that decision.

I wanted everything to be perfect, and this was overwhelming.

Today, I’m proud to have done a substantial milestone to my project by creating this blog, even if things do not look great yet.

On my next article, I’ll dive deeper into the advantages of doing imperfect things — I should call it messy productivity, right? (give me your opinion in the comments)

In 1st february 2022, I’ve embarked in a 100 days writing challenge. This is post number 3.