I Installed EmDash Without Knowing What I Wanted to Blog About

I’ve wanted somewhere to write for a while. The only slight problem is that I don’t actually know what I want to write about.

Naturally, I dealt with this by installing an entire content management system.

EmDash was advertised to me as the spiritual successor to WordPress, which was enough to make me curious. I also wanted to experiment with Codex and see what it could do. To my surprise, it successfully set everything up with very little intervention from me.

Getting the site running was the easy part. Then I reached the empty dashboard and encountered the more difficult question:

What is this blog actually for?

I could write about technology. I’m always trying new software, building small websites and finding unnecessarily elaborate solutions to minor problems.

I could write about working with data. I’ve recently moved into school data management, where I spend a lot of time learning how systems such as Arbor, SISRA and Excel fit together—and occasionally wondering why they don’t.

I could write about games. More specifically, I could document my ongoing struggle to stop browsing my library and actually finish one. I recently completed Spider-Man almost by accident, so there may be hope for me yet.

There’s also fitness, self-improvement, reducing how much I drink and my numerous attempts to organise life slightly better than I did the week before.

The usual advice is that a blog needs a clearly defined niche. Perhaps that’s true if you’re building a business or trying to dominate Google. That isn’t really what I’m doing, though.

For now, this is simply somewhere to document the things I try, what I learn and whether any of it was actually worthwhile—spoiler alert: it probably won’t be. Some posts might be useful. Others may just serve as evidence that I spent far too long solving a problem nobody else knew existed.

I don’t have an ambitious publishing schedule. I don’t have a carefully planned content strategy. I’m not even completely sure what the second post will be.

But the site exists, this is the first post, and that seems like a reasonable place to begin.