Blog writing barriers to overcome

Another year has elapsed since I wrote my last blog entry. At first, I thought the problem is only my English. But in the meanwhile, I see several other reasons why I do not blog for the new static website(s).

I will elaborate later on the following thoughts. At the moment, I want to list the possible reasons for my blogging abstinence:

• I am still not comfortable with the new community I want to address with these blog entries.
• The topics I want to cover are still relatively new for me so that I often believe that my reflections and discussions of these subjects are trivial and not worth reporting.
• I am doubtful which of my different upcoming ideas belongs to my German weblog “Gedankensplitter” and which is better suited for the English community.
• I am still struggling to get the focus right for my English blogging. In the last few months, I get a better feeling on which two topics I would like to concentrate: Open Science and Data Science. (More on these two topics and their relationship will follow in another blog entry.)
• From my professional point of view, I still generate most of the experiences and material in German such Interviews, Reviews, Talks, Lectures, etc..
• It is much more exciting for me to learn new things in R or about strategies for Open Science than to continue to blog frequently for my German weblog.
• There is not enough time to write for both weblogs. I wonder how other people like Andrew Gelman write at least one blog entry every day, sometimes even 2 or three.
• Coming closer to my retirement the necessity to foster my professional online presence is not so vital anymore.
• The English language is also a barrier. I am not so comfortable and skilled to write in a witty and informal style as I am used to it in German.
• And finally there are these enormous complexities with blogdown and Hugo. There are so many software layers to watch out with all their difficulties arising for updates, incompatibilities, and bugs. As I have not used these technological infrastructures on a daily bases, it happened that I either forgotten many details. Instead of writing down my thoughts, I had to waste my time to re-learn the software tools.

As you can see: A considerable bulk of difficulties and barriers to overcome! Some of the points of this list, I will reflect more in detail at a later time.