I think everyone that blogs for any length of time gets the deja vu feeling about posts. It could be your own or someone else’s, but there are times when it seems there can’t be anything new to blog about. You’ve been there ‘brought the t-shirt’, blog and tagged that same t-shirt - heck you’ve even taken a picture of it and flickr’d it. If you blog at any regular interval you will at some point get the feeling you are rinse and repeating yourself.

It’s times like these that challenge even the most blog mused of us. I get it more with the design posts on my blog - I feel sometimes I’ve said this so many times before how can I justify saying it again. The thing is really that sometimes you do repeat - time is like that and there are only x number of subjects in the world (some blogs are only on one subject after all) - yet the key is to finding a fresh approach to it. Journalism is like this, the same news goes around and comes back again but it’s how the delivery is done that is the key. Finding fresh material and inserting it into the mix also reduces this rewind / heard it all before feeling.

Blog block can easily come as a result of this blogged there before feeling. I’ve had a fair bit of that lately in the sense of ‘what is there to write about anymore’, the thing is there is always something to write about as a blogger and you just have to de-block yourself. Yes, you may have said it before but have you said it in this way or with this view before? Seeing things from different sides of the coin really can offer a new fresh post. Often it’s tempting to start a new blog when this feeling comes - if you do something different then yes it won’t be the deja vu for a while, the point is it always comes and how you deal with it when it does. The successful bloggers in my book are those who take that blog repeating and turn it into new angles and a new approach to things. Often returning to a subject can bring it more power and more relevance.

I’ve been thinking of how I should look through my own archives and take my own advice (first time for everything there) in revisiting some post views and seeing if I feel the same or things have changed? We have a constant source we can use in those creative droughts and most of us just ignore it to search for elusive shiny new posts. Time traveling back isn’t always bad and it’s something I want to start doing a bit more every now and then. Yes, you have to be careful in rinse and repeating or going back - everything in moderation - but it also can be a rewarding and good post making thing to do.