The year was 2008 and yours truly was working as a network administrator. It was my first job after I rejected the Boring Nerd Life (dropped out of Accounting classes in college) and embraced my true inner nerd (followed a 6 month training program for Network Administrators). For some reason, while working, I thought “I should blog about some of this work stuff!”, even if it would just serve as a reminder for myself.
I just happened to have created a blog on WordPress.com not much earlier and that blog became the victim of my work musings. That blog I created in 2008 still exists today. Matter of fact, you’re reading that blog now. In a sense, anyway.
This blog took some turns down the road. After a while I thought it would be better if I turned my personal blog into a tech blog named “Joomla & More”. It would lead to great things, like more credibility and more money. Surely I would be able to monetize the blog and maybe even quit my day-job someday. So I kept the old blog posts, and rebranded everything.
Spoiler: it didn’t work out. Instead creating that blog was one of the triggers of an (undiagnosed) ADHD fueled episode of spending too much time on fretting over concepts and ideas for my blog and by extension my yet to build “Content Empire”. I started to buy domain names, pretend I was a Serious Content Creator on Twitter and spent a lot of time cosplaying as a content creator. If I ever posted a video or an article, it was sporadic at best. I don’t think that I’m exaggerating when I say that for every hour I spent creating an article (and later a video), I would spent at least fifty hours on thinking about creating and content and managing my “Content Empire”. Coming up with ideas, concepts, a structure for everything and researching how to do everything “the right way” became what I spent my time on, instead of creating content.
It was a big, unhealthy obsession and a bottomless hole that I dumped my time, energy, money and joy into.
This went on for years. In 2019, I rebranded this blog (again) and decided to self-host it. I was convinced that not self-hosting was holding me back. If I used all the proper tools I would save money to make money!
So PowerUserGuide was born, and to the surprise of just me more work to maintain a blog didn’t make me want to create more content. Who would have seen that coming? But wasn’t my website stunning? After all, I was using the Astra theme and Elementor, the tools of the trade for Le Epic WordPress web designer.
Audience, here’s another spoiler: It was and isn’t stunning. Trying to do everything myself was a waste of more time and resources. The PowerUserGuide era was the final nail in my content creation coffin. I wrote maybe 2-3 posts a year at best. In the spare time, I let my ADHD play some more Content Manager 2019 up to Content Manager 2024.
The last idea my ADHD had, was that I had to double-down on content creating. On top of everything else, I had to create a personal brand as well. A website was built, a YouTube channel was created. And then nothing happened.
Restore Save Point?
Fast forward to yesterday. I’m having one of those content creator cosplay sessions and am fighting with my theme on torettox84.com – the one I paid a bunch of money for because I could “completely customize it” – to do what I wanted, which was not displaying an annoying ugly line, and got fed up.
“I don’t want to deal with this shit anymore,” I said. “Battling with this stupid theme, managing all those sites only to never write a damn thing…”
I finally admitted that the last time my blog(s) didn’t suck the joy out of everything was back in 2009 when I originally just wrote posts on this blog and didn’t have to focus on anything else. I just did things and posted about them and then went back and did some more cool things.
With no illusion that my ADHD / Autism will magically stop claiming my free time and energy I decided to roll back to the earliest available save point. I decided to dust this blog off again and started by throwing out all the old content that’s been ported to PowerUserGuide a long time ago. I bought a new subscription for the blog, snagged a new domain name and pointed blog.torettox84.com to it and wrote my first blog post in months (the one you’re reading). So I’m all set to go and start over.
The blog over at torettox84.com will stop existing once I give that site a “static pages only!” make-over down the road to rebuild it as sort of a “find all my stuff here, except my blog. Which is over here” type of site.
As far as this blog goes I think it’s better to be honest and to lay off the “Here’s what to expect going forward!” nonsense and milestones, to-do’s, half-assed promises and other things that lead to where we’re at right now: A restored version of my original blog using a save point from 2008 before my “Maybe I should be a content creator” nonsense became an ADHD obsession. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll get around to actually creating some content this time.
Torettox84 out.
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