Since I started this blog I have been writing mostly just about what’s on my mind and ways I could improve myself and my productivity but I wasn’t writing with a certain niche in mind, which is not great for SEO and marketing my blog. I’ll still write what’s on my mind because this is richiekastl.com and my website, but I’m going to start mostly writing about a little Wordpress plugin known as Advanced Custom Fields or ACF for short.
I subscribe to many of the things that come out of Tim Ferriss’s mouth, and his criteria for choosing to pursue a project is two-fold. First off he is choosing projects that are based on the relations and skills they will help him develop so that even if the project fails, he succeeds in developing relationships and skills that can transcend the project. The second criteria are that he has to feel very visceral excitement about the project.
I believe I check both of those boxes when it comes to choosing ACF for this blog. Even if I fail in creating a successful business out of this blog, the skills I learn from taking this deep dive will help my career and I am excited about it. By learning more about what ACF can do and advanced techniques, I’ll be able to develop faster using it and I’ll be able to create better websites. There are also other things that I’m interested in using ACF for such as building static Wordpress sites and I’d like to learn more about how to use ACF with Gutenberg.
I’ve been following John Sonmez’s How to Build a Blog Course while creating this website and one of the exercises was to come up with 50 different blog post ideas for the niche that you decide upon. I did that last night and there are quite a few exciting blog posts that I can’t wait to start writing. These are a few of my favorites.
- Why you should use ACF
- ACF vs Gutenberg
- Using ACF IN Gutenberg
- Using ACF to build a React front-end for your Wordpress site
Once I have quite a few posts about ACF under my belt on this blog, I’m going to create a giant post that’s an all in one resource about getting started with ACF, why you should use ACF, ACF best practices, and so on.
To my astute developer readers, you may be wondering why this blog is built with Gatsby and not Wordpress. That’s a reasonable question and I did it because Gatsby is much more performant than Wordpress. Since Gatsby compiles down to HTML files my site loads much faster, I don’t have to worry about security, and I can host my website for free on Netlify.
Once I learn how to create static Wordpress sites then I’ll rebuild this site using that and create a post documenting the process.
I’ve been wandering aimlessly with this blog for about 2 months now and I’m excited that I finally honed in on a niche that I’m interested in. Even if I fail and nobody reads this blog, I’ll learn a lot more about ACF, I can establish myself as an expert on ACF, I’ll create a great writing habit, and I’ll have more technical writing experience. If I don’t gain traction on this blog after a year of writing about ACF I’ll pivot to something else.
Thank you for reading.