Blogging (7 blogmarks)

It's an incredible feat to have been blogging for so many years, to have done it so consistently, and to have it all still out there for the world.

I've had a blog for the better part of the last 15 years, but there have been various iterations of it that no longer exist anywhere on the public internet. In fact, I'm not even sure I could find the static site generator repos where some of those lived.

The metamorphosis of the internet means the path I took to get here literally doesn’t exist anymore. Back then, a nobody with a personal website could rank for top search engine terms, webcam footage could go viral on YouTube, and the hot thing for gaining subscribers was something called a “blog carnival.”

While there are a lot of benefits to blogging -- e.g. refining your own ideas and documenting your expertise -- it is tempting to think that putting out interesting articles could hockey stick your audience and, by proxy, your career. Unfortunately, that's trying to play a game that hasn't existed for a while.

After twenty years, I think my only advice is to write the kind of stuff you like to read. That way, you’ll know you’ll reach an audience of at least one person.

I feel conflicted about statements like this because there is probably some truth to it. At the same time it's a bit dismissive when you're trying to have an impact and build enough of an audience to be part of The Conversation™.

You are not blogging enough. You are pouring your words into increasingly closed and often walled gardens. You are giving control - and sometimes ownership - of your content to social media companies that will SURELY fail.

I’m trying to write here more and link to things I read here more in this spirit of sharing more thoughts and publishing them in the open where I own them.

Via Gergely Orosz on bluesky

I’ve never managed to get a blog going, but I take a ton of notes for myself. So this time I’m trying the mental hack of calling these posts “notes” and writing about the most mundane things that could still be interesting to another person.

Same for me. Ever since I started writing “blogmarks” which have evolved more into what I’d consider notes, I find myself posting all the time. Whereas a blog post feels daunting, I get halfway through writing it, and then give up.

This is the rationale that has made it relatively easy for me to write so many TILs over the years.

Fun fact: there's no rule that says you can't create a new blog today and backfill (and backdate) it with your writing from other platforms or sources, even going back many years.

I should probably skim back through my past tweets and see if I have some popular posts or under-developed ideas that could be turned into backfilled blog posts.

Atoms are a cool variant of what I'm doing with blogmarks. tbh, it is closer to the format I want to be doing. I often have thoughts that aren't really tied to a specific blog post. Sometimes I have thoughts that bring together several blog posts or links.

Brandur describes Atoms as:

Multimedia particles in the style of a tweet, also serving as a changelog to consolidate changes elsewhere in the site. Frequently off topic.

Anyway, this one looks great and has good content.

It reminds me of Smidgeons. Though Maggie is more long-form with these as compared to Atoms.

just an incredible quote from someone who has now been blogging for 25 years

I felt when I started in February 2000 that I was coming to blogging late. I procrastinated about setting it up. People I knew were already doing it.

And so much more interesting reflection and history of the emergence of blogging.

Everything starts with awareness. So be noisy about the precise things that I’m interested in, and see what happens. That means product design but also means nonsense about weird history or whatever.

There is something really cool about seeing other people adopt a practice of writing TIL-style posts and coming to the same realizations and conclusions that I did with mine.

TILs are great learning resources and reference resources:

I think this new section of the blog might be more for myself than anything, now when I forget the link to Cryptographic Right Answers I can hopefully look it up on the TIL page.

In Simon Willison's 1 Year TIL Retrospective, he points to how they reframe writing and publishing something:

The thing I like most about TILs is that they drop the barrier to publishing something online to almost nothing... The bar for a TIL is literally “did I just learn something?”—they effectively act as a public notebook.

and on the value of always having a learning mindset:

They also reflect my values as a software engineer. The thing I love most about this career is that the opportunities to learn new things never reduce—there will always be new sub-disciplines to explore, and I aspire to learn something new every single working day.

It was fun to read through both of these posts having just myself reflected on A Decade of TILs.