Aspiring DM

Apologies! I have somewhat stalled on all fronts of the DM path over the past month or so. Life does indeed have a habit getting in the way and it certainly has done!

Anyway…

With the new found information kindly provided by Mario, I now had a whole host of new things to look into. One of which was starting a blog.

I chose to start with this, as I could then blog in parallel to the learning and update it as I go. Not only would it chart my progress, it would help me remember the things I’ve learnt, the people I’ve met and places I’ve been. There would also be the possibility of showing potential employers what I’ve done to get where I am. As well as, hopefully, helping others on the same path. Plenty of positives.

I had a search for ‘best free blogging sites’. Had a look through some of the results. Signed up to a few to have a play around and get a general feel for them and quickly found out that although there are many free ones, a better experience and interface can be found by paying extra, though not too much.

I settled on WordPress, evidently, as I liked the style and simplicity of the blog templates and here we are.

In all I found it quite user friendly, which helps, and it only took me an hour or so to set it all up.

There are 6 tiers of plans on WordPress. Free, Starter, Explorer, Creator, Entrepreneur and Enterprise. Each increasing in features, capability and cost as you go. I settled on the starter plan for £36 a year, only £3 per month but billed annually. This would give me everything I needed as a novice and as I grew and became accustomed to the layout, features and product I could always upgrade if needed. It also had 6Gb storage included which is more than enough for me at the moment. It gave unlimited pages, users, unrestricted bandwidth and a free domain name for 1 year if required. Just what I needed.

I signed up and then had to think of a suitable domain name… Various ideas sprung to mind but AspiringDM soundest truer to form and better than the rest. The various different extensions and options were a bit lengthy but I discovered that for a small yearly fee AspiringDM.com was available and here we are!

That was that. I now had a website for my blog. All I needed to do was actually write something, but what? I’ve never actually written anything before, not properly, let alone something that I would cast out into the web for anyone to see.

I thought it best just to break down the path into it’s different components. Each component being a post in itself. Why, how, courses, meet ups, advice and conversations along the way amongst many other things. I wanted to keep it simple and easy to read, a bit like me really. I also wanted it to be candid, light-hearted and a true representation of how I was going about things, hopefully that comes across.

Now, there I was, all set up and ready to start my blog. Took a little getting used to the commands, layout, inserting hyperlinks and pictures but soon got the hang of it. There are some great tutorial videos and advice and as I have mentioned, it is very user friendly. There is also AI feedback if required which will generate feedback and critique your post, advising things to consider, all optional of course.

Surprisingly I found it pretty easy to write once I’d got going, lots of internal conversations going on. At the time of writing I’ve got 11 drafts ready to finish, to which I add when I think of it and at least some sort of linear narrative. They are all on my Trello board to remind me of what’s coming up next. I even find myself working on them in a coffee shop or pub, something inconceivable to me a few months ago.

The other good thing is being able to use the WordPress/Jetpack app on my mobile so I can add things whilst out and about, though usually it’s when I wake up at 3 in the morning with some random thought I want to get down. All in all though, I found it quite an enjoyable thing to do once I got started.

Well, that’ll do for now, better start working on the next one.