When I pressed publish on yesterday’s blog post, it felt like when I first published a blog post back in, gosh, when was it? 2008? 2010? Will any read it? Do people still get updates in their inboxes?

And then I thought, cool. I wrote a blog post like in the good ol’ days of blogging. Before SEO. Before content creators and influencers. Before ads, sponsorship, and affiliates. Cool.

And once I published the post, I clicked around the back-end of WordPress. The first thing I noticed was the SEO analysis. According to this new-to-me feature, I did so many things “wrong” in yesterday’s blog post. No focus keyphrase! Missing social markup! What the what?

Things have changed in the blogosphere. I should have known.

I also spent a bit of time looking at the front-end of my blog. Meh. I need to clean it up. I re-learned how to customize widgets (like the things you see on the top/side/bottom of the page around the main middle area). Goodbye blogroll. Goodbye dated announcements. I was unsuccessful at deleting the Google ads. I’m working on it.

I need a fresh place to write.

I need to learn and relearn about this platform. I have lost touch with the “rules” of blogging, and I’m finding that the blogs that I do read are harder to navigate. There’s just so much stuff and pop-ups and banners. Many online spaces are just. so. cluttered.

I like white space. Even if WordPress or Google tell me I’m wrong.