Category: Daily

Everyday notes and personal updates

  • A Look Back at the First Week of the strongorange Blog

    It has been about a week since I opened the blog.

    Before starting the blog, I kept wondering if I was just taking on more work when I already didn’t have much time.
    Could I really do this properly? I was already worried about starting a blog when I’m not even that good at writing.

    Still, I had been wanting to write better for a while. I also wanted to leave some thoughts in writing about the aquarium that became a new part of life after getting married. And I felt like it was too wasteful to keep thinking about it and do nothing, so I just started.

    Fortunately, after running the blog for a week, I’m enjoying the process itself, almost like I’ve started a new hobby.

    What I didn’t expect was that some unexpected questions would come up along the way.

    It took longer than I expected to write and edit.

    Yoast SEO plugin checklist
    I never thought I’d be worrying about SEO while writing.

    What surprised me most was that polishing and revising the draft took longer than writing it in the first place. I honestly thought a quick round of editing after the draft would be enough.

    Once I finished a post and was about to publish it, I found myself checking whether the title was too stiff, whether the slug looked strange, whether it was written the way the Yoast SEO plugin suggested, and so on…

    Even so, I didn’t dislike the process. It feels like I’m slowly touching up a space that’s mine, which is annoying but strangely fun. As I keep writing, I’m also getting more of a desire to do better, so I’ve been pulling out some books on writing that I read before and revisiting them during my commute.

    I decided not to push too hard

    A video made in Canva, and a YouTube video thumbnail
    The first time I’ve used Canva since my college days. I don’t think it used to do video editing, but now it does.

    I said I would keep things very light, but I’ve already made and started using an English version, an image optimization tool, a draft-writing tool, and an editing tool.

    I’ve even tried video editing, something I’d never done before. It’s just cut editing and adding music, but still. I uploaded it to YouTube, made a Threads account, and linked my blog posts there too. I’m already doing quite a bit.

    I’ve had more than a few projects that started with too much energy and then fell apart as I lost steam, so when I feel myself overdoing it, I think it would help to remember the purpose of writing about my aquarium and reset my direction like this once a week.

    I thought there would be no visitors at all

    Google Analytics screen, with 1 real-time visitor appearing while I was writing.
    Google Analytics. There were more visitors than I expected. A real-time visitor showed up while I was writing. Thank you!

    At first, I honestly thought there would be zero visitors except for family and acquaintances, but strangely enough, about one person a day comes in through search.

    What was especially fun was that, since I was also posting in English, people came from the U.S., Poland, Canada, and elsewhere. Thank you!

    But there were more hacking attempts.

    hacking tries for my wp admin account.

    There are far more malicious visits than real visitors.

    Lately the attacks seem to have dropped a bit, maybe because they were blocked and moved on to other targets, but brute-force attempts are still coming in.

    But even that is kind of funny. Even if it isn’t a person, someone is still finding this place!

    Next week

    Next week, I’m planning to organize some aquarium photos, finish the Salifert post, and pull out records on the tank livestock one by one.

    A clownfish hiding quietly behind the torch coral during a water change.
    To wrap up, the cute clownfish hiding behind the torch coral during the water change