I am doing this blog post simply because I get soooo many questions about whether I am still blogging or not!

In my heart, I still am, but I get where the questions are coming from as it’s been like 10 months since my last blog post. I don’t have any intentions to give this up at present, it’s just that I really went through a lot in the last 10 months, health-wise and logistics-wise. The health part, I feel like it’s a conversation for another time, but for the logistics, oh boy. My iMac was debilitatingly slow and couldn’t do anything productive anymore, it could take 30 seconds to execute a single command or mouse click. It would take a right click even up to a minute before the menu would appear. On the worst days, it could hang for 20-30 minute periods and I couldn’t do anything. Even starting it up took 20-30 minutes! Simple reels that might have taken 30-40 minutes to edit would have taken days on the iMac. Since I couldn’t get anything done anymore, I had to have it checked in for diagnostics and repair, and when it came back after many weeks, it really still was slow in many ways so the entire ordeal of having a backlog pile up went on for at least half a year. It took me quite some time to acquire another computer, transfer and back up all relevant files, and set up shop. This is why I have yet to recover from the worst backlog in my own history as a content creator.

By the time I got to adjust to all the file transfers, I found myself just as overwhelmed as any other content creator. With Instagram introducing reels in late 2021 and then starting to punish any non-reel content in 2022, it became so hard to catch up with blogging as I now had to conceptualize which content would be done in a reel and which would not. And sadly, more of that needed to be in a reel, adding so much more workload strain. Before the algorithm started to punish non-reel posts, I was able to do things seamlessly somehow as I would shoot photos that I could use for both Instagram and the blog, as well as for Facebook and even Twitter. Fast forward to this month, the average content creator now has to churn out video content for Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and YouTube non-Shorts––but every single platform wants a different approach and a different kind of content.

It would take a TED talk to explain all the intricacies, but I think it’s easy to see that for creators who were able to seamlessly use photos for blog posts and Instagram + Facebook posts before, it’s now much more complex and I’m honest that I’m not able to catch up. I wish I had an editing and shooting team like other creators so that I could free up so much of my time that goes into editing, shooting, and setting up and focus that time instead on conceptualizing and ‘performing/modeling’ for shoots. Everyone wants to be an influencer these days thinking about all the glitz and glamour, but in reality, if you’re unable or unwilling to shell out the money for professional equipment or professional teams, it will really be very hard to catch up with all the content requirements in both quality and quantity these days.

Even myself, I actually can’t even tell if people even read blogs anymore. As far as this blog’s stats are concerned, it’s been generally stable, but even I wonder who are the people who are still coming to visit my blog. I’m thankful for those who still come over to read or check out swatches because all the industry clamor has been short-form video content these days.

But when I do analyze things, I still want to continue blogging because being in this for so long, what I have come to realize is that there is no single social media site that can be dominant forever. I don’t know when will the algorithm of a certain app favor my posts or when an app might start punishing me, and every year, there is a new and more dominant site that everyone wants to swarm into. I want to continue providing reviews and swatches that can be easily searched for any time without having to suffer from decay algorithms that social media sites do (i.e. the older your post, the more hidden it will get). 

So I guess the best explanation I can say is that I don’t have the intention to stop blogging, I just am overwhelmed with all the new industry content requirements like the rest of the creators in this industry. As someone who does everything myself, I still really am figuring out how I can continue conceptualizing, filming, editing, and managing all the replies and follow-ups without sacrificing my health and well-being.

Please give me time to figure this out. I think I’ll get to a solution somehow.