Day: 25 July 2023

There’s a perception that a blog is a long-lived, ongoing thing. That it lives with and alongside its author.¹

But that doesn’t have to be true, and I think a lot of people could benefit from “short-term” blogging. Consider:

• Photoblogging your holiday, rather than posting snaps to social media
  You gain the ability to add context, crosslinking, and have permanent addresses (rather than losing eveything to the depths of a feed). You can crosspost/syndicate to your favourite socials if that’s your poison..

• Blogging your studies, rather than keeping your notes to yourself
  Writing what you learn helps you remember it; writing what you learn in a public space helps others learn too and makes it easy to search for your discoveries later.²
• Recording your roleplaying, rather than just summarising each session to your fellow players
  My D&D group does this at levellers.blog! That site won’t continue to be updated forever – the party will someday retire or, more-likely, come to a glorious but horrific end – but it’ll always live on as a reminder of what we achieved.

One of my favourite examples of such a blog was 52 Reflect³ (now integrated into its successor The Improbable Blog). For 52 consecutive weeks my partner‘s brother Robin blogged about adventures that took him out of his home in London and it was amazing. The project’s finished, but a blog was absolutely the right medium for it because now it’s got a “forever home” on the Web (imagine if he’d posted instead to Twitter, only for that platform to turn into a flaming turd).

I don’t often shill for my employer, but I genuinely believe that the free tier on WordPress.com is an excellent way to give a forever home to your short-term blog⁴. Did you know that you can type new.blog (or blog.new; both work!) into your browser to start one?

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