Publish button pangs

It’s hard to believe that I started blogging 13 years ago! I’ve gone through many different web addresses, and I’ve published things on other platforms like wikis and discussion forums, (and even in a book), but blogs are my favourite way to share.

The challenge with blogs, and even this daily one, is that all these years later I still get pangs before hitting the publish button. I still want to read over my post one more time before I commit to publishing. Is my message clear? Did I miss something? Is my grammar good? Is there a better word I could use to describe… ?

And then I still make mistakes! My last post was written on election night, and scheduled for the next morning. I woke up, meditated, re-read the post, made a few small changes, and hit the update button. All nice and easy. I dropped my kid to school and my post got published while I was seeing a teacher and some students off on a field trip. My post auto Tweets, posts to Facebook, and to LinkedIn.

I walk back to my office and I check Twitter, someone ‘Liked’ my post and on a whim, I click on it and re-read my post again, this time as a published, ‘final’ copy…

I find two typo’s. Two careless mistakes! How could I have missed these, they are so blatant! So I go to my WordPress App, click the edit button and make the changes. It’s 8:15am, the post was live for 1/2 an hour, maybe 3 people have read it, but I’m embarrassed. Ashamed. Upset with myself for being so careless.

It’s stupid. I know it is. But any work I’ve done until now to reduce the publish button pangs is gone. They are back in full force.

The weird thing though is that I like it! I like the pressure I put on myself. I believe I write better because of it. I believe I care more because of both a real, and an imagined audience. I get to be a writer! I also get to be my own editor, and I want to be excellent at both of theses things.

Let the pangs come. I want to be hesitant before hitting publish. I want to feel the pressure to do well, to not make careless mistakes, and to look things over one more time. These pangs are a badge of honour that I wear as a blogger.

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P.S. I’ll still make mistakes, so feel free to point them out to me. You will be doing me a favour.

P.P.S. I’ve seen students care far more about their writing because they were sharing their work publicly. They too can benefit from the publish button pangs!

Your chance to share:

2 thoughts on “Publish button pangs”

  1. Aaron Davis

    This touches on Clive Thompson’s argument for the power of public:

    Many people have told me that they feel the dynamic kick in with even a tiny handful of viewers. I’d argue that the cognitive shift in going from an audience of zero (talking to yourself) to an audience of 10 (a few friends or random strangers checking out your online post) is so big that it’s actually huger than going from 10 people to a million.

    1. datruss

      Hi Aaron, I blogged a response this morning: ‘Plus one – an audience matters.‘ Also, after I hit ‘publish’ a related post came up, ‘Share it‘ with a great quote from Seth Godin, ‘Did you publish?‘:

      They (whoever ‘they’ is) made it easy for you to raise your hand. They made it easy for you to put your words online, your song in the cloud, your building designs, business plans and videos out in the world. They made it easy for you to be generous, to connect, and to lead.

      Did you?

      Maybe today’s the day.

      There is no audience unless you are willing to share!
      Cheers,
      Dave

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