🏠 In a far corner of the world

Should You Start Your Own Blog?

I use Blogger, Google’s free blogging platform that has been around for decades. Some people even think Blogger is dead, but I don’t think that’s true. There are still many people using it, and plenty of successful blogs continue to run on the platform.

It may not be the trendiest platform on the internet today, but it is still simple, reliable, and accessible. You don’t always need the newest platform or the most complicated tools to create something meaningful. Sometimes, an old tool is still a good tool.

You can post even if you’re not a professional artist—don’t be shy. I’m not a professional either. I’m self-taught, and I do art as a hobby, not as a profession. I create simply for the joy of being creative.

But remember one thing: your work should be original. It shouldn’t be a copy of someone else’s entire work, because that can result in a copyright claim if you don’t have permission or provide the required attribution or credit.

That said, you can absolutely draw by taking inspiration from other artists, including from my own work. You don’t have to create everything entirely from imagination or come up with every idea from scratch. You can borrow an idea or take inspiration from something without copying the work itself. That’s why they say, “Steal like an artist.”

But honestly, I mostly steal from nature and God’s work. 😄 I have also always relied on compositions from other artworks. Over time, though, it becomes much easier once you get past the beginner stage.

Now, I’d say that about 90% of the time, I can create my own original artwork. Sometimes I still take ideas from other works as inspiration, but you can’t match my work with anyone else’s inch by inch or detail by detail. I always add my own touch and style to it. Sometimes, I even take the original inspiration much further and add tons of my own ideas, creating the world I want to have.

In the era of AI, I do use it for grammar correction and for creating characters for my book. But authenticity is a human quality—we have it. AI can do impressive work, but without humans, AI is nothing.

That’s why, in the age of AI, I believe we need to bring out even more human creativity. People may want to see genuine human work more than ever. And even if you use AI, use it reasonably. Don’t create meaningless content just because AI makes it easy. Put your heart and mind into what you create. Develop something that is truly yours.

You can use any tool you want, but be honest about your work. The tool doesn’t define the creator—the human intention behind the work does.

Blogger is easy to begin with. It’s an old platform, but it still has a fairly reasonable modern touch. Other website-building and hosting platforms can be quite complicated and expensive. Even though I changed this blog extensively with the help of AI coding, every idea and design decision came from me. I don’t think you can easily do the same thing on many other platforms, especially as a beginner.

Blogger is quite user-friendly for beginners, although it can become overwhelming once you start touching the code. Even with AI helping you, coding is still a completely different world.

I only know the very basics of coding, but with AI, I was able to build useful tools and games for The ArtyeTown and transform an old Blogger theme into something much closer to my own custom design, with the user interface I wanted. But it took me about six months to get here.

And even now, I don’t have a huge audience.

Don’t think social media is necessarily any better, either. The worst part, in my opinion, is the algorithm.

For beginners, I’ll explain the basic idea of how recommendation algorithms work from a creator’s perspective. When you post something, the platform generally doesn’t show it to everyone immediately. It may first test the content with a relatively small group of people. If the response is good, it can then be shown to a larger audience.

That system makes sense in some ways, because platforms have an enormous amount of content to deal with. But from a creator’s perspective, it can also feel cruel. When you’re new, your reach can be very limited, and there is no guarantee that your work will ever grow significantly.

With a blog, the process can feel much slower. Search engines need time to discover, understand, and evaluate a new website and its content. It can take a long time before a small blog begins receiving meaningful organic traffic.

That is the sad part: you never really know whether you will have a big audience someday.

I originally came to Blogger partly to escape the algorithm game of social media. But eventually, I realized that the internet has its own systems everywhere. The rules aren’t necessarily bad—they are needed to organize an enormous amount of content—but sometimes it feels as if these platforms are playing God. They decide what gets seen and what remains invisible.

And when you don’t understand how these systems work, you can easily start thinking there is something wrong with your talent.

There may not be.

If you don’t succeed on the internet, it doesn’t automatically mean that your work is bad or that people don’t like it. Sometimes your work simply hasn’t reached enough people. Algorithms are selective, and they allow a relatively small number of creators to become extremely visible while countless others remain almost completely unknown.

Of course, the people who become successful online often do put in enormous amounts of work from the beginning. I’m not denying that. I’ll try to do the same.

But whether I eventually succeed or not, I’m going to do my best and enjoy the process.

Because what else do I really want?

Why should I sacrifice the happiness I can have today while waiting for success tomorrow?

If I enjoy creating, writing, drawing, experimenting, and building something today, then today has already given me something valuable.

Maybe the audience will come someday.

Maybe won’t.

But I’m still going to create.

At the moment, The ArtyeTown has received around 23,000 views over the last 12 months. But honestly, I don’t know how many of those views are from real people. The internet has bots and automated traffic too. Still, when I look at Blogger’s country-wise analytics, I can see visitors coming from different parts of the world, so I believe many of those views are genuine. It might seem low, but not completely. People sometimes scroll through the blog and view all the artwork without clicking to open each one, so it doesn’t record an individual view for every artwork. Instead, it may count it as a single visit, with additional clicks recorded as separate actions.

The numbers fluctuate a lot, though. Some days I get more visits, some days a moderate amount, and some days very little. I’ve decided not to look at the analytics too much anymore. I don’t want numbers to dictate how I feel about my work or determine my worth as a creator.

I also think platforms like Blogger have an opportunity to welcome a new generation of people who are interested in blogging. Social media no longer feels as natural to everyone as it once did. There is so much pressure to show a bright, perfect life while hiding the flaws, failures, and ordinary moments behind it.

A blog can feel different. You can choose what you want to see and what you want to share. You can slow down, write your thoughts, create something meaningful, and let people discover it on their own terms.

Of course, blogging platforms also need to continue evolving. The internet has changed enormously, and platforms need to keep improving while preserving the simplicity that makes blogging appealing in the first place.

But if you trust the process, just start.

Write something. Draw something. Build something. Share something.

Don’t wait until you have the perfect audience, perfect skills, or perfect numbers. Start with what you have, improve along the way, and enjoy the output of your creativity.

Maybe people will discover your work tomorrow. Maybe it will take years. Maybe it will never become huge.

But you created something that didn’t exist before.

And that itself is worth something.

Happy creating... 🎨✍️

One more thing:

 only if you are truly skilled at something and have a constant supply of ideas can you realistically keep creating every single day for a long time. I can write every day, although I still get writer’s block sometimes. But art is different.

When I create artwork, I would rather choose quality over quantity. I need time between pieces. If I force myself to draw every day just because an algorithm wants consistent posting, I might run out of ideas—and worse, I could burn myself out.

Burnout is real, and anyone can experience it.

That’s another reason I don’t like the pressure that algorithms can create around constant posting. Creativity shouldn’t have to come at the cost of your well-being.

Look at successful YouTubers and other large creators: many of them eventually build teams or use tools to help with editing, publishing, research, and other parts of the workflow. Some may have started by doing everything themselves, but as their work grows, they often need some form of help, automation, or technology to make the process sustainable.

You don’t have to do everything yourself forever.

The goal should not simply be to keep feeding an algorithm.

The goal should be to keep creating without destroying the creator.

Blogger Isn’t Perfect for Artists Either

One more problem with Blogger is that it isn’t particularly art-friendly. It was originally built around blogging and writing, so when you post artwork with very little text, it can sometimes feel like you’re working against a system that expects more written content.

I don’t fully understand how Google’s algorithms work, and honestly, I don’t think ordinary creators should be expected to understand every detail of SEO, indexing, ranking, and recommendation systems just to share something they created.

I do get visitors through Google Images, though, which shows that visual content can still be discovered through search. I hope that as more people use blogs to share artwork and other visual content, platforms and search systems will continue to become better at understanding different types of creative work—not just text-heavy pages.

Google is a huge platform, and I’m just an ordinary creator trying to make things I enjoy. I hope platforms like Blogger can become even more user-friendly so creators don’t have to learn a whole world of SEO tricks just to get their work discovered.

Of course, for that to happen, people may first need to rediscover Blogger.

That’s actually one reason I’m writing this post.

I could easily hide the fact that The ArtyeTown runs on Blogger and make people wonder, “How did this person build this website?” But the truth is, it isn’t as difficult or expensive as it might look. The basic Blogger platform is free, and you can connect a custom domain if you want your website to have its own name.

Google is one of the major companies that still provides a platform like this without charging for the basic hosting. Other website-building options can become expensive once you add hosting, storage, plugins, themes, or other services.

And yes, large corporations have plenty of things worth criticizing, including privacy practices, business models, and pricing strategies. But I also think it is fair to acknowledge the useful things they provide.

YouTube is a great example. It has become one of the biggest places in the world to learn almost anything for free. You can find tutorials, lectures, demonstrations, explanations, and people sharing years of knowledge without having to pay for every lesson.

Of course, platforms have their own rules and requirements, and creators still have to work within those systems. But I hope useful platforms like Blogger and YouTube continue to remain accessible to ordinary people.

Because not everyone wants to become a corporation.

Sometimes a person simply wants a small place on the internet to write, draw, experiment, share ideas, and build something of their own.

I hope we keep those places fair and easy to use.

-Godwin Issac