Building a Blog is Hard...

Building one's own blog is a pretty challenging and daunting task.

When I first started out trying to build one...I named it purely as "BuLaDiFu's Adventures". The purpose of it was just to post my own views about the online mmo games that I have played myself. At that time, I was playing Entropia Universe for quite a while...about 2 years I believe.

So naturally, Entropia Universe was my first post on the blog. Being my first post, I feel that it is a bit coarse and unrefined. Up until now, I still think it is and have yet found a way to refine it, to make it more professional.

After that first post, I stopped...real life matters kicked in I guess...or perhaps I just didn't have enough perseverance.

One year later now, I stumbled back upon the blog. Still unsure how to build it, I decided to just try posting more and see how it progresses. One post by one post, I started writing. First it was League of Legends, then a post about a guide and skin customisation site to League of Legends, then Arma 2: Free and now Galaxy Online II Part One, Galaxy Online II Part Two and Galaxy Online II Part Three.

As you can see, the more I posted, the more it appeared to me that I've "lost" myself. The posts seemed to have turned from posting my views to becoming more like a guide.

At that point, I stopped and started surfing around for ideas or solutions to my problem. I've thought about making the blog both a place for guides and reviews, thus I renamed my blog to what is it now "All You Need to Know About Games". Though somehow, in terms of layout, I have yet to figure out how to incorporate both into the same blog.

At the same time, this surfing brought my attention to another problem.

"My blog looks kind of lame..."

So I looked around for a customisation to fix it. I found a pretty cool template and tried it immediately. It looked cool, but somehow didn't quite fit what I have. There were useless options in it. To make things worse, I'm no coder and have no clue how to read the xml coding. What I do have is some "hello world" basics for C and java. Using that and killing quite a few of my brain cells, I spent some time going through the code to remove the useless options (by trial and error).

When I finally finished doing it, I noticed another problem given by the free template. It had a bugged paging navigation. It only showed "Pages 1 of 2   1   2   Next" when it is supposed to show 4 pages (2 posts per page). I wanted to give up and revert back to the old lame look, but decided to try and google for a solution before I give up. I tried the coding given by websites that I found, but most didn't work. Eventually, one did though and in the form of a javascript widget. You should have seen how elated I was, having fixed the problem and keep this customisation.

However, now I still have to face the problem of determining the direction my blog should head, refining the style and layout of the blog and making the blog a useful and informative site for its readers.

All in all, it is a very tough task to build a blog from scratch. Hopefully things will become clearer as I make more posts.

From,
- BuLaDiFu -