Why Blogging Sucks
Back to TopHello all and welcome back to the Saxly Pirate!
I have the task of writing a blog for Season 10 Week 2 qualifier for the blogging competition BlogChamps. The first step in writing a blog is to come up with a topic to talk about of course. For the life of me though, I could not think of something to write about which annoyed me so much. So much so that I started dislike blogging.
So like any rational human would do, I chose to go with what was in my mind. So here we are, talking about why blogging sucks. Let's see how this goes.
Enjoy!
- Brainstorming is Aggravating
Yes, little reward. Whether you admit it or not, if you blog, you want some reward. It is a natural human instinct.
In blogging, you often spend a lot of time trying hard to do your best and make it amazing. Then after a month of it being published, you only have 200 views. Is this a joke? And then I go to the blogging page where top blogger’s posts get started and I look and read some of those blogs.
I am not pointing fingers or anything LINK GOT 1250+ VIEWS
I would never humiliate or embarrass anyone and show one of those blogs. That is mean and really not nice. If someone where to do that, they must be awfully mean.
You're kidding, right? I mean sure, 75% of them are really good and deserved to be shown off. That other 25% though. I’m not saying that I am better than them, but comparing it to the other blogs around them. How are you a top blogger?
Oh wait, you're a titled player. If you didn’t know, all titled players get the top blogger role. They get to skip all of them gruesome, pain inflicting process of working your way up in blogging. Many of the really good bloggers who make amazing blogs aren’t titled players. They started new and worked hard to make good and worthy blogs and then finally you get the deserved top blogger status. It's just not fair.
Since we are talking about becoming a top blogger as a non-titled player, let's dive into that more. As I already said, it’s almost impossible to become a top blogger anymore.
I know many people will say that status doesn’t matter. I have two things to say about this.
1. Whoever says this is probably a top blogger already. I need say no more.
2. You are completely right! It shouldn’t be about getting a top blogger just to be one. However, it is about that. That is just the way it is. Personally, I don’t care too much about being a top blogger to be one, I just want it so I can expose my blogs to more people.
Now, you may ask why it is impossible to get Top Blogger anymore. My answer to that is, I have no idea. All I know is that there are many deserving people who aren't top bloggers. Some even will be judging this blog for BlogChamps. 😀
A couple years ago, it was achievable to become a top blogger. I knew many people who started out with blogs not so great and they kept improving and improving and finally got it! Now however, you can’t get it. Your blogs can’t reach a lot of people. You don’t get a lot of recognition. You don’t get a lot of things while the top blogger page is filled with blogs from titled players.
I think I have clearly stated my opinions about there being little reward for bloggers nowadays. Geez, I sound like I am 80 already.
Brainstorming will actually be the death of me. I have almost hit the bottom of the barrel of ideas. It really shows because I am writing this blog. Personally, I can’t write blogs about actual chess like lessons on openings and how to be strategic. Who would want to read how to play the Monkey's Bum Gambit from a 1100 rated rapid player who hasn’t played a game since March of 2025?
By the way, if you were wondering, that is why I write blogs about stupid things. Because that is all I can do.
If you are not a blogger and your thinking that brainstorming a blog topic about chess but not really about chess is easy, let me give you an analogy
You are in English class and you have to write an essay about a book you didn’t read within 45 minutes. What do you do? You do what any sensible student does and stare at your paper for 5 minutes. Then, after realizing that you are going to fail, you write your name as neatly as you can. If there are words on the paper you fill in the spaces like the circles in O and D. Then, finally, you B.S your way through it.
That is what I do for almost every blog except I don’t get to color anything in. So really, blogging is worse than that.
If Chess.com moderators are reading this, I am sorry but it’s true. I mostly love chess.com. Look at what they accomplished. They are well known, have over 200 millions users, stream chess events for free, and it goes on and on. Chess.com is in my opinion the best Chess online platform. It is really amazing.
Well, all except for the blogging aspect. There are many problems and bugs that many bloggers face. In fact, when I was originally writing this blog, I was writing it in the blog editor on the chess.com website. However, every 2 minutes the website froze and I would lose all my progress.
I had to continue writing the blog on Google Docs. This isn’t just a special case with me, I know others who face the same, or similar problems. It is also only the blogging part of Chess.com, everything else works perfectly.
Furthermore, yes there is more, if the website manages to work, then you face a whole other problem with formatting. Guess what, we are going to take a field trip and I am going to show you personally how bad it is.
Let’s take a look at this image:
So, this is taken from the Chess.com blog editor and this is where you write blogs. As you can clearly see, there is a lot of space between “Example” and “SOOOOOOO” right? Ok, now I am going to preview the blog and see how it looks now.
You can’t make this stuff up. I swear in my life I did not delete the lines. Chess.com just took it away.
This is typical when writing in the Chess.com blog editor. This also isn’t the only time there are formatting issues. As I am sure many bloggers now, I can go on and on showing how bad it is. But I will spare you the agony of that. I will only show you one more example. 😁
This example is the same thing with spacing, but it is with putting a chess game in a blog. Look here:
Above the chess game, there is no space while below it there is a line of space. I know when I wrote this blog that, despite how many lines I put, it didn’t work. It pissed me off too because it looks so not right.
As I said, I will not torture you with more examples, so I will kindly stop now.
I have already trashed Chess.com about Top Bloggers, and in this section I will continue to do so. If you didn’t know, Top Bloggers have more tools they can use when writing blogs as compared to us poor pheasant bloggers. I think it is absolutely stupid that non Tob Bloggers don’t get access to these tools.
Why is that? Well, I would think that Chess.com wants more people to participate in blogging. I mean, it grows the community and could potentially get people to get memberships. Let me show you the difference in tools.
Here is what I, as a non Top Blogger, get:
I get the basic stuff: bold; indent; alignment; inserting videos, games, images; font; font size; etc. This is what top bloggers get:
A whole row more worth of goodies. They get anchors, quotes, subscripts, embedding, special characters, and superscripts. It’s not fair, why are we, non Top Bloggers, being limited on bringing out our full potential. Those tools would be helpful and elevate my blogs a lot.
There are work-arounds to get them, but that requires HTML coding. For example, I wanted to do a basic quote I would have to write this in the HTML editor:
<blockquote><p>sentence</p><br>— author</blockquote>
It shouldn’t be that hard for a simple blogger to elevate their blogs to the next level. Chess.com could fix it by not discriminating against non Top Bloggers and put a fricking button for it.
By the way, all the HTML codes I use come mainly from this blog from fellow amazing, non Top Blogger, @DocSimooo. It is filled with a bunch of resources for HTML and basic tools available to bloggers!
If you want to make a good blog, you have to put the time in. There is no way around it. You can’t make a blog that would win BlogChamps in an hour only. It isn’t possible. I mean, this blog took me a few days and it still isn’t the best blog in the world.
It really sucks also when you are going to school everyday, have a lot of extra-curriculars(or rather being in band which is the same thing), and having to do homework when you get back home. It is really hard to manage all of it, especially when you procrastinate.
Now personally, I don’t procrastinate. @VOB96 can attest to this. I think it is a stupid thing that is done and can easily be avoided. Instead of waiting for the last minute to write your blog or do your work, just do it ahead of time. If you do this, you will get more time for school and other boring stuff.
“Procrastination is the most common problem in chess improvement.”
— Magnus Carlsen
That is me to the letter!
If you are thinking “blogs aren’t that hard and don’t take that much time. All you do is yap.”, I have something to show you.
This is a blog I wrote a while back (not promoting it, I am showing you something…)
That blog took me too long. Maybe a week in total, and personally, I think it shows. I consider it my best blog yet. My writing was almost on point and it just looked like an overall good blog. The judges at Blog Champs also thought that apparently because that made me qualify for the Sweet 8 round in Season 4. Sadly I had to drop out. Womp womp.
Now let's compare it to this blog.
I spent about 3 hours thinking about this. I think you can tell that I spent little time on it. For the games in it, I was so cramped with time that I used Chess.com’s analysis tool and put that in as the analysis. Yeah… I didn’t do too well in Blog Champs with that.
In the end, I am trying to show you that the amount of time that you spend writing blogs really does matter. The more time means the better the blog. Sadly, many of us, us bloggers, don’t have the time and have to attend to real life matters unlike some other people. This results in poorer blogs and burning out bloggers.
Chess.com got lucky here since they are finally not at fault.
So, what is my overall point? If it wasn't clear enough, here it is. Blogging sucks. It shouldn't be this dislikable, but it is. There are many problems that I face when trying to write a blog, and most of them don't come from me. It is from outside sources. However, if these sources could improve on what I talked about, blogging could be something that become more enjoyable!
However, even though I have many dislikes about blogging, I continue blogging. Why? Well, I guess you could say its a guilty pleasure. Just like Arby's. Its bad for you but tastes amazing. If you are American and disagree, I shall not talk to you.
On that humble note, thanks for reading!
P.S. If you were somehow offended by this blog. I am deeply sorry and I didn't mean to do so. It is meant to be an over-the-top satire blog and display true comedy. Or not.
Bye!
