Writer’s block and the power of good habits

Back in a day when I was blogging almost on a daily basis, writing a new blog post was a zero effort for me.  That includes coming up with the idea for the post, the actual content, typing, formatting, and every some promotion around social networks and among my friends and colleagues.

The last few years, however, I stepped away from blogging and shared my thoughts, ideas, and useful links on a variety of media, such as internal company Slack, and a multitude of instant messengers, like Telegram and WhatsApp.

All that brought me to where I am now.  Most of the content that I shared on social networks and instant messengers is buried in the archives, never to be seen again.  My creative powers are diminished to the point where I’m struggling to verbalize a tweet.  And my publishing productivity as practically non-existent.  Even when I want to write up a short blog post just like this one, every cell of my brain is resisting the idea.

However, I want to bring that skill back.  I’ve setup daily reminders to blog.  But they aren’t doing much.  At least for the last month or so.  I’m constantly distracted by the ideas of reorganizing this website, catching up with history first, and so on.  But nothing ever happens.

So, I guess, for the next few weeks you’ll see my hectic attempts at restoring order.  For now, I will write for the sake of writing.  Just to get back into the habit of it.  And while I’m at it, you’ll probably be puzzled by the unusual randomness of subjects, inconsistency in length, quality and schedule, weak attempts to fill in the blanks, and other weirdness.  Bare with me.  Or not.  After all, the web is huge.

Mobile test

One of the many reasons for abandoning this blog was the lack of the proper mobile app. Earlier versions of the WordPress for mobile were very limited. They were lagging behind the fast-paced development of the web application.

Giving it a try now, I already see that there was a significant progress. The UI is much cleaner and easier. Block editor is supported. And there are probably large improvements in the media handling. Although, that is yet to be tested.

This gives me hope…

Welcome to HTTPS

Finally, after years and years of recommending Let’s Encrypt to everyone, this blog has now followed its own advice and moved to HTTPS. All the old links should be automatically redirected as well, so most people probably won’t notice any difference. But if you do, please do let me know.

And now on to the Facebook Page


As I mentioned earlier, sharing of the posts from this blog to Facebook stopped working a while back, due to the changes in the Facebook API and polices.  Rather than completely giving up on it or continue with the annoying manual sharing, I’ve decided to try the Facebook Page approach (which I’d much rather not).

So, lo and behold, here comes the @MamchenkovBlog Facebook Page.  I’m sure it’ll take me a while to find the best way of using it, if there even is one.  Please bear with me until I figure this one out.  And, as always, if you have any tips or suggestions – do send them my way.

P.S.: This post is a test of the sharing to Facebook Page functionality.