I’m… honestly not sure what to make of it. Organising personal websites spatially seems like a strange idea (although there’s a list view available too). And ‘pixel’ seems to
be a strange name (at my desktop resolution, my ‘pixel’ comprises… 169 pixels). It’s got a little bit of a “million dollar homepage” (remember that) feel to it… though at least it’s not
operating commercially. In fact, the best thing about it seems to be that it’s home-grown indie/smolweb content.
I guess it’s a bit like a webring? (Maybe it needs an embeddable component that lets a site show it’s “space” and hop to neighbours?)
So… yeah; I’m undecided on this one. But, as always, I love when people do cool, random and experimental stuff with the Web!
The first time I saw Michelangelo’s David in person, I wept. Never in my life have I witnessed a more beautiful piece of content.
I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Museum patrons all around me were looking up from their phones to admire David as well. Despite it being legacy content,
David was so scrollstoppingly captivating that it generated stronger engagement than TikTok and Instagram combined, despite those platforms offering fresher, more
personally relevant content.
My awe only grew when I noticed the museum gift shop converting 60% of its traffic, numbers that would make any content creator salivate.
…
In case it wasn’t obvious that Michael was being facetious (oh god, please let it be obvious), he says as much right after this introduction.
The point is: ‘content‘ have become a catch-all term so broad as to be meaningless. A tweet is content. A Netflix series is content. Everything in-between
that is passively or mostly-passsively consumed is content, whether it’s AI-slop music or template-driven memes. And content exists to
trigger engagement and drive traffic and oh shit now we’re down a rabbithole of meaningless SEO jargon.
Like Michael, I don’t like it. These different media are fundamentally different, and we should embrace that. A blogger is not (necessarily) a documentarian, nor are they
a comic book artist or an exhibition curator or a podcaster. They can be all of those things, but they’re different things! When we treat them all as interchangeable kinds
of “content” for a generic “audience”, we lose something about what’s beautiful and unique about each of them… and we lose the opportunity to find and name new art forms at the
intersections between them.
You can call things “content” if you like, but the vocabulary available to us is richer than that, and the things we create – in whatever form they take – can be too, when we use it.
I have such an admiration for those who post so much without fear of reprisal; posting purely for the sake of loving writing and sharing their opinions and thoughts with the world,
not because they’re trying to manipulate search engines or grift some ad revenue from whatever happens to be popular that week. Pure and simple posting for the love of the game.
Take my Three Rings colleague Dan Q, whose
blog spans multiple decades across countless topics. I’m sure he would shy away from such an accolade, but I think it’s truly a fantastic example of using the Internet as it was
intended: having your own little corner of it and filling it with the things that interest you, regardless of whether anybody else particularly cares.
…
Aww.
I first met Oli shortly before a nonprofit I founded – Three Rings – took the necessary technical steps
to formally adopt/rescued a piece of software he’d been working
on – Portal – in order to continue to make it available to the voluntary organisations that depended upon it (and perhaps, hopefully, along the way make it suitable for use by a
wider range of charitable enterprises to boot).
I’ve long known that Oli blogs well and his writings are worth seeing… but he does so at what one might call a “normal person” cadance. This is perhaps unlike my pace,
which might be generously described as somewhere between “breakneck” and “obsessive”.
How do people blog for this long without running out of things to say, asks Oli. And then, over the course of his post and via a glimpse at a post-ideas spreadsheet (as well as a
conversation with an LLM), he comes to a conclusion:
…
As for the question I started with – how do people blog for thirty years without running out of things to say? I think I was approaching it from the wrong direction. Nobody sits
down with thirty years’ worth of material ready to go. They just keep finding things interesting for thirty years.
…
And that’s it: that’s it exactly. You don’t start a blog with three decades’ worth of ideas. Hell, if I could only write about things that I’ve got notes or drafts about, and at my
current cadence, I’d be dry before the end of the year (and I have a lot of half-written ideas just waiting for polishing!).
If there is a secret to blogging for thirty straight years, I think it’s this. Stay curious. Never stop asking questions. Never stop learning. Try to look
at your world as if you’re seeing it for the first time, and remember that what’s mundane to you could be fascinating to somebody else, or in the right light. And, crucially, the
single-most important thing of all: find a motivation to keep writing for yourself. When you’re writing for yourself, first and foremost, you’ve always got a reason to
keep going.
That’s what I think, anyway. You don’t have to blog like me, of course, but if you want to… the paragraph above represents all I
know about how to do so!
Writing HTML is punk rock. A “platform” is the tool of the establishment.
And I’ve never seen anybody express what I was trying to say better than… this, stolen in almost its entirety:
Three chords and a domain name.
You don’t need a deal with a label. You don’t need a platform’s blessing. All you need is an out of tune guitar you can barely play, or a free text editor and a hosting bill.
That’s it. That’s the whole scene.
I. We Are the DIY Kids
Punk didn’t wait for labels to say yes. It plugged in a blown out amp in someone’s basement and played anyway. Bad singer? Makes no difference. Three chords? You go. Own a drum
kit but never had a lesson? You’re the drummer now.
The IndieWeb works the same way. Nobody’s waiting for permission to publish a website. You don’t need a “content strategy.” You don’t need a niche. You need a place that’s
yours, and the nerve to hit publish.
Sometimes it’s ugly. It’s the wrong font. It’s a blog post about nothing at all. It works and it’s yours.
II. We Own the Masters Now
In the old days, the music industry owned the masters, the distribution, the airwaves. You made the music; they made the money and decided if anyone got to hear it.
Big platforms run the same racket. You write the posts, build the audience, generate the engagement, and they own the feed, the algorithm, and the right to bury you or boot you
whenever it suits the shareholders.
Not here. Own your domain. Own your data. Own your identity. Your words live on infrastructure you control, not on borrowed servers that can evict you without
notice.
III. No A&R, No Venture Capital, No Gatekeepers
No punk band was chasing a platinum record. Punk was about making music and getting it into people’s hands – that was the whole transaction.
No indie web builder is chasing Series A. We’re not optimizing for growth. We’re not selling your attention to advertisers. We charge a fair price for a real thing, if we even
charge at all, and either way nobody’s pitching us to a boardroom.
Small. Sustainable. Answerable to no one but ourselves.
IV. The Zine Never Died, It Just Got a Domain
Punk had zines – cut, pasted, photocopied, and passed hand to hand because the real press wouldn’t cover it. That’s blogging before anyone even called it blogging.
We still do that. A blog is a zine with better uptime. An RSS feed is a mailing list that never asks for your email. Webmentions are show flyers stapled to telephone poles all
over town, pointing back to each other, building the scene a link at a time.
Community over audience. Nobody in this room is just watching.
V. Make What You Need, Not What “Everyone” Needs
Stop designing for some hypothetical user that doesn’t exist. Build the thing that scratches your itch. Use it yourself – eat your own dog food. If you’re not
depending on it, why would anyone else?
Do this enough, in the open, sharing your code and your notes and your half-finished ideas posted for all to see, and the rest of the scene will pick it up. That’s how it
spreads: not top-down, but kid to kid, site to site.
VI. Weird Is a Feature
GeoCities had hideous backgrounds, animated GIFs, and a MIDI file that played on page load. It was ugly, but it was also alive in a way no template can ever be.
We’re not going for pixel-perfect. We’re not A/B testing a homepage. Have fun, or what’s the point? Keep the web weird. Keep it handmade. Keep the mohawks.
VII. It’s an All-Ages Show
Punk wasn’t always right about this. Each scene had its bouncers at the door and idiots in the pit. Bands worth remembering spent half their set shouting them back out – Rock
Against Racism, Riot Grrrl, the Dead Kennedys writing a song to tell the Nazi punks exactly where to go. That wasn’t a side project. It was a full-time job.
So… Everybody gets a seat on the Indieweb. No matter your color, faith, gender, who you love, how your brain is wired, what your body can do, how old you are, where you were
born, or which language you write in. Nobody at this door is taking a ticket.
No degree, no job title, no follower count, no years of experience, no permission from others who were on the scene first.
And if you’re already inside, hold the door open for others. Link to the new kids. Answer beginner questions without snark. Write the alt text, caption the video, keep it
keyboard-reachable. A site nobody can use is a club with stairs at the doors and no accessibility ramp.
All are welcome on the Indieweb. It’s not a code of conduct bolted on after the fact. It’s the entire reason we’ve built our own places on the Web to begin
with.
VIII. This Is the Counterculture Now
In the ’80s and ’90s, blasting Punk Rock was a way of telling the establishment where to stick it. Today, publishing on your own site instead of feeding the algorithm is the
same middle finger, just a little quieter.
We opt out of the surveillance feed. We opt out of the engagement farm. We opt into a web made of small, stubborn, independent spaces that are loosely joined, built to last, and
owned by those who make them.
We don’t need major platforms.
We have the Web, keyboards, tools, and community.
IndieWeb is Punk. Oi!
Is it time yet for me to go a step further and say this?
I love my RSS reader. It’s the first thing I reach for when I’m “catching up.” As I’m reading through my list of feed items, I often come across blog posts that do not give me any
way to interact with the post!
Here are some options in the order of my own preferences.
Webmentions
…
Reply email link directly in feed
…
Reply email link at the bottom of your post
…
Social media links to the blog post
…
Contact page or form
…
I’m with Michael… mostly. And I try to follow all of his suggestions and more here on my site. Let’s break it down from Mike’s list:
✅ Webmentions are fantastic. It’s been a long journey to get there: we had trackbacks. Then we had pingbacks. And now we’ve got webmentions. Each an improvement upon
the last. I support all three. (If everything works properly, this post should result in a webmention being sent to Mike so he’ll know about this comment, even though I wrote it
on my blog, and it’ll appear as a comment or at least a link on his blog). Webmentions are magical.
❌ Reply email links in feeds is an interesting idea. I don’t currently do this. Except on this post, where I have, experimentally! While I’m a big fan of
reducing the barriers to engagement, I figure it’s acceptable to expect people to click-through to see their contact options, so long as you’re already supporting Webmentions. Maybe
I’ll add these in a future iteration.
✅ Reply email link at the bottom of your post – yup, I do this every single time. I use dynamically-generated email addresses per-post (mixed in with some hidden
honeypots) as an anti-spam mechanism, as well as to help me work out what something was a reply to (it’s sometimes pretty ambiguous: I don’t know why, but often people
will email me about years- or decades-old blog posts and not specify what post it was, as if I’d written them just this morning and they were fresh in my mind!).
🤷 Social media links to the blog post: I mean… kinda. I don’t do much in the way of centralised social media, but I automatically push a summary to the
Fediverse at @blog@danq.me and selectively push via my personal account @dan@danq.me too. And occasionally
others. They get tucked-away in a <details> called “syndications”. I’ll get around to connecting to Bubbles eventually, although
only my articles and not e.g. replies like this make it to Bubbles, because apparently I’m too high-traffic for Bubbles otherwise (!). Someday I’d like to
negotiate something a bit better with them, e.g. all of my articles plus anything else I specifically choose so I can include Bubbles-targetting replies like
this!
✅ Contact page or form – I use both, assuming “form” here means a comments form.
Mike’s list is, of course, incomplete. Here’s a few options Mike hasn’t listed, and I think are worthy of mention:
🦛 Reactions – I use “reactions” to enable ultra-low-effort engagement for people who just want to say “hey, I read this”
without doing anything more. Look at the bottom of this post on my blog and you’ll see that you can click on, say, a thumbs up, or a star, or… a hippopotamus?… icon to give me some
feedback. Other people use other kinds of reaction/heart buttons: e.g. Bear Blog comes with one built-in, and there are third-party services that are basically like
hit-counters but on-click.
✍️ Guestbooks – I don’t have one of these, but I’m considering it. They’re properly retro, and they’re more about responding publicly
to a whole site than a specific post… but sometimes that’s a thing that a person wants to do!
✉️ Postal mail? Yes, really! For almost a year now I’ve been encouraging people to send physical mail postcards to by
blog! Right now you have to click-through to my contact page for the details, but in a future version of my blog the postal address will be right there next to the comment form.
I’m sure there are others too, but I just wanted to look at Mike’s list, compare it to my features, and think a bit outside the box to boot.
I made the flaming digits using a stock effect in Corel Photo-Paint; this is an attempt to replicate the “feel” of them.
Hit counters are pretty dumb for a variety of reasons. Counting “hits” was never a terribly-representative reflection of the popularity of your pages. But also: because they’re
a public representation of your popularity, there was every incentive to “game” them… even just by hitting refresh a couple of times. Making them untrustworthy and pointless.
1998 —
2006: Webalizer
Who can forget The Webalizer? Those Microsoft Excel ’97-grade barcharts!
Back in the day, “proper” web stats was something you did on your log files. Take log files, pump them through a program, get amalgamated output. And the king of these tools was
The Webalizer.3
On a few of my websites – and some that I helped host for my friends – I’d have The Webalizer run daily, collating an archive of monthly stats plus “month-so-far” for the
current month.
The Webalizer attempted to differentiate “hits” from “visitors”. And it tried to distinguish between browsers, and isolated bots, and tracked pulled referrer-data, and could
even try to geolocate IP addresses. It was pretty magical for its time.
2006 —
2016 Google Analytics
I was an early adopter of Google Analytics: my site ID (“UA code”) was only five digits long!
Those graphs were slick for the Web technology of the day. A product of that period in the mid-naughties when Google made products that actually impressed users
and didn’t just make them roll their eyes?
Google Analytics works via a JavaScript snippet which collects a variety of information about the visitor and sends it to Google’s mothership.
A third-party cookie that connected all Google Analytics-powered sites, plus everybody’s activity on other Google products, provided a wealth of data that you
couldn’t get any other way. Want a gender breakdown of your visitors or their interests? Google can “help” you with that… and all the while, “helping” themselves to copies of all the
data too.
If your website runs Google Analytics, it’s part of Google’s massive data-harvesting machine, monitoring people as they move around the Web. Webmasters trading away their visitors’
identities for some pretty charts seems pretty disgusting to me; it saddens me that I was ever “part of the problem”.
2015 —
2023 Piwik
Since around 2010, I’d been actively blocking Google Analytics, which made me feel a bit like a hypocrite to be inflicting it upon others. I looked for an alternative and found it in
Piwik (now Matomo), an open-source and self-hosted analytics tool.
A self-hosted Piwik/Matomo installation provides almost the same level of useful depth as Google Analytics, but you get to keep your soul.
I ran Google Analytics and Piwik side-by-side to validate the latter, and found it to be excellent. Not only was it collecting data
in a much more-ethical and respectful way, but it was also producing more-accurate results for my readership who, leaning somewhat “techie”, would sometimes block Google
Analytics outright for all of the same reasons I did.
It was pretty good, but…
2023 — …
(Almost) nothing?
…I don’t like the kind of blogger I am when I’m collecting stats!
It’s like… being a teenager again and having that hit counter, and getting excited when it goes up. So what if a number went up? What does
“popularity” mean? Isn’t the impact more important than the number of eyeballs?4
So in 2023, after winding my analytics down by instalments for many years, I just… stopped.5
I realised that so long as I was able to easily “watch the stats”, I’d be temped to write for the stats. To treat it as a score. To make the hit counter go up.6
That, in essence, is why I don’t really “do” any webstats any more. Analytics don’t serve me and the blogger I want to be, and they didn’t represent anything that I would
consider a useful metric of success.
If somebody’s moved by what I do, that’s great: but a hit counter going up by one doesn’t tell me that; and it never did. Now if they leave a comment or drop me an email or even
send me a postcard, that’s how I know that I made a difference!
Exception to the rule: GoAccess!
While I don’t actively watch the stats any more, I suppose I can still generate them, from my webserver logs, Webalizer-style. Except nowadays I’d probably
use GoAccess:
There’s a bit of a “hump” where last week’s blog post about apps started trending on Bubbles, HackerNews, Lobste.rs and the like. But I knew that already because people sent
me lots of comments!
There’s a script that I’m able to run, if I feel like it, to parse the most-recent of my Caddy logfiles. It takes about one minute to run per day
of logs to process, and outputs a perfectly attractive self-contained HTML file.
It’s not clever. It’s not sophisticated. It doesn’t use cookies or JavaScript or, indeed, anything other than what my webserver gives me for free.
I barely use it: maybe once every 18 months or so (today was the first time in well over a year). It’s there if I need it. And it’s inconvenient-enough to use that I’m not tempted to.
2 By “blog stats”, here, I mean statistics about visitors to my blog, not
stats about my blogging (which I track and share in excruciating detail).
3 Did you know that the last point release of The Webalizer was in 2013 and
the last feature release was in 2010: much later than I thought was the case!
4 Also, how do we even count “eyeballs”. Right now, about a fifth to a quarter of my
visitors are bots. Amazonbotalone accounts for over 2% of my traffic. (I should probably tighten my
robots.txt.)
5 Nowadays, there’s no tracking scripts whatsoever on my site. I
don’t set a cookie unless you ask me to (and then it’s “transparent”: you can see exactly what it contains and what it’s for), I don’t try to fingerprint you in any way, I don’t even
keep server logs longer than 60 days! Back when I used Jetpack I actively nerfed its stats-collection “features”. I don’t want your personal data!
You don’t have to differentiate by post kind.
You don’t have to put full contents in your feed.
You don’t have to keep a library of “maybe-some-day”
drafts so long that you’ll never reach the bottom.
You don’t have to have a feature image.
You don’t have to keep posts up forever.
You don’t have to have tags.
You don’t have to syndicate to the socials.
You don’t have to use any particular tool.
Bloggers who spend their time arguing
About vs vs ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ vs
Could be reading and writing instead.
You don’t have to have a plan to “monetize”.
You don’t have to write your own theme.
You don’t have to be run your own server.
You don’t have to make every post your best.
Blogs. The curated, written looking glass into someone’s perspective. That’s what I love about them. Blogs. Waking up in the morning and spending a little time reading over the
carefully chosen words of another human being. Truly astounding. Blogs. Poured time and energy, someone distilling themselves into this personal, sharable medium. Blogs.
…
I guess to bring this post to an end… if you don’t have a blog, change that! (especially if I know you IRL, seriously). I wanna hear about you and your life! Start that quirky and
personalised website. If you already do, tell me and share! Every one of them is awesome; from digital gardens to byte-based megacities. Fill them with you and share! I
can’t wait to start reading :)
Oh, so very much this.
There was a time, a couple of decades and change ago, when almost all of the people I spent time with in my real life blogged. Nowadays, it’s far fewer. Ruth shares interesting bits of tech (plus Thames Path walks!), and I keep an eye out in case Gareth shares
more ‘plane-related news or Andy takes a deeper dive into his music… but nowadays the active
blogs I follow are, for the most part, people I know online (or, at least, people I knew online first, even if I’ve subsequently met them in person).
Blogs allow for a deeper level of thought; not everything is well suited to an in-person chat. We sometimes need time to get our thoughts in order and detailed concepts are often
much better understood in writing. It’s honestly a shame that we have confined ourself to short processing times and quick responses. A back and forth can sure be fun, but so can
the meticulous; and nothing’s stopping you from chatting over the stuff you’ve written – imagine how insightful that could? Blogging really recaptures that “handwritten letter”
spark.
Getting updates from people over text is kinda hard too. While I’ve been abroad, I have missed so many moments in peoples lives (good and bad), of which I usually only hear a
summarised fraction. I get it though, asking is hard and responding is even harder; retyping a shortened version of something for the 5th time isn’t much fun. I dream of a time
where more of my friends write blogs, a world where I can easily grasp and know the wheres and whats in someone’s life without feeling like I am nagging for details; where the focus
is being a friendly part of their lives…
I don’t expect this repost to encourage any of my IRL friends to dust off their old blogs (or start new ones). But I can dream!
Question for the audience: Do you tell people you blog?
I was reflecting on this recently, after I inadvertently mentioned to a colleague that I had blogged about a topic a few days earlier. That, of course, started the questioning
from them: Oh, what’s it called? What do you write about? Can I see it?
This one’s been doing the rounds recently, and I’ve enjoyed seeing responses from RNotte, Kev, Alex, and others (there’s a longer list on David’s post).
I feel like my answer is different from those of many other participants: I’ve traditionally made no effort to keep my cyberspace and meatspace separate: probably everybody in my
“offline” day-to-day life knows that I write here, and my “online” identity centres around the same central point too.
But lately, I’ve leaned harder on talking about it online. Most of my real-world friends had blogs at some point, but virtually all of those have also long-ago abandoned
them1, and along with that shift has come a
disinterest in blogging and what it is (or can be) as well. Based on WhatsApp groups we share, most are happier reposting Facebook memes than sharing their own original
thoughts in any kind of public forum.
Anyway: I think that few would disagree that within popular culture, blogging has “had it’s day”. That’s not to say that there aren’t a great (and growing!) number of blogs out there:
just that it’s not the popular touchstone that it was twenty years ago: data-harvesting social media silos have tragically become the “norm”, and for a blogger whose interest was
targetting a specific audience… they need to go where the audience went.
Which I guess is something Kev was adjacent to when he said:
I tend to say “I enjoy writing” rather than “I have a blog.” And I think that’s because of the negative connotations blogging has with the general public.
I think some people tend to put “bloggers” in the same bucket as influencers, or podcasters. Which isn’t the case – many of us bloggers have no aspirations of
influencing anything, we just like to share out thoughts on a medium we control.
This is the essence of it, I think. Blogging began as a way for people to write about… whatever they liked. But before long it also became a vehicle for marketing: “influencer bloggers”
appeared and, let’s face it, made a bad name of it by making the popular expectation be that blogging is something you would do to make a living, rather than for the love
of it. I’m not entirely surprised that so many people dropped blogging as a hobby rather than be clumped-in with them.2
But those same people had to jump platforms when social media silos became “the way” to advertise to a large audience, so now they’re all on Instagram, TikTok, and the like. The real
personal bloggers – the ones who do it because blogging itself is the right medium for what they want to do – are still here. And, indeed, it feels like they’re in
resurgence. Blogs are coming back, baby!3
The question was, though: who do I tell that I blog? And the answer is: absolutely anybody and everybody. But I mostly only make “subscribers” (a term
I don’t terribly-much like, because it feels like it implies that increasing that number is some kind of “goal”) out of cyberspace friends, not meatspace friends, these days, I think.
But just sometimes, the worlds collide and somebody I see on the school run will talk about finding something of mine online, or somebody I meet through work will say that they read
something I wrote, once. I enjoy these strange organic connections, but it can feel a little weird and awkward to be “recognised” unexpectedly.4
Footnotes
1 I’m pretty sad about it, honestly! I miss seeing blog posts from people I know in “the
real world”; I see some, but not many.
2 It’s still a thing, of course, and I get countless requests for paid guest posts, ad
placements, participation in link farming, and the like. And I’ve even had people ask me in person how I “monetise” my blog, as if making money from it was ever the goal!
3 Although probably never to the point where people will write about it as an
up-and-coming phenomenon in a national newspaper, again. I think we’re past that stage.
4 Unexpected recognition also happens as a result of my work on FreeDeedPoll.org.uk and Three Rings, but these tend to be slightly easier to predict
depending on the space I’m in. There are still surprise moments, though, and they’re still sometimes awkward at first!
Me: Alright, let’s write a blog post about CSS.
🧠: Okay, but we need to make an entire design system first.
Me: That seems very complicated.
🧠: How long could it possibly take? 10 minutes?
Tell me about it.
I started a blog post about pedestrian crossings months ago and somewhere along the way I got bogged down with implementing a web component that uses 16-bit pixel art people
and cars to simulate and compare the relative throughput efficiencies of different timing systems and HELP I WENT TOO DEEP THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A SIMPLE BLOG POST.
I remain a huge fan of Kev Quirk‘s “100 Days To Offload” blogging challenge. And today… I just completed
it for the seventh time!
Kev announced that he completed it again today, too. He uses a different metric to me – he counts “posts over
a twelve month period”, while I use a slightly more-restrictive subset of that: “posts in a calendar year”, because it was easy for me to make a
table out of in my blog stats.
My blogging ramped up again this year, and on 24 August I shared a motivational poster with a funny twist, plus a pun at the intersection
between my sexuality and my preferred mode of transport.
* Pedants might claim this year was not a success for the reasons described above. Make your own mind up.
After some discussion, Kev agreed that the earliest year I could claim for was 2020.
Personally, I feel like each of the hundred posts should occur on different days too. This is relevant to me, because sometimes I post multiple times in a day… but it’s
100 days to offload, not 100 posts to offload, right?
Therefore, by my own restrictions… the soonest I could achieve the goal in a year would be the 100th day of the year. Right?
Which is today.
Which I just did. 🎉
I started the year knowing that I’d be trying to do this “speedrun”. What I didn’t realise was how hard it would be.
Two decades ago this month my friend Matt posted five predictions about the future of the world. I’ve revisited these predictions
twice since: ten years later and twenty years later, and “scored” his predictions both times.
I love that the Web’s memory (and the persistence of URLs) makes this kind of long-term conversation possible.
That’s all you need to know. If you’re doing it, you’re doing it right. If you have decided to reclaim ownership of your place on the web, you’re doing it right. It doesn’t matter
how you did it. It doesn’t matter if you’re self-hosting or using a SAAS. It doesn’t matter if your content lives on a database or in a TXT file. It doesn’t matter if you did
everything yourself or you paid someone to do it for you. It doesn’t matter if you post once a day or once a year. What matters is that you’re doing it. Your effort is commendable.
You deserve to be thanked so, thank you.
Wonderful words from Manu, there, that I think every blogger needs to be told once in a while. You have permission to write stuff. There
isn’t a wrong way.
how do you find things you want to blog about? is it just about letting out one’s thoughts and feelings and some sort of catch-up to one’s latest projects?
probably will start a blog of my own soon™ :3
What an interesting question, and not one I’ve heard before.
I’ve not heard it before… probably because my blogging is… eclectic! Sometimes I blog about technology. Sometimes I blog about geocaching and geohashing. Sometimes I blog about what’s
going on in my life. Sometimes I blog about news, politics, and what’s going on in the world. Sometimes I blog just to share weird things I’ve seen on the Internet.
(I’ve sometimes worried that my approach to blogging alienates every conceivable audience. I mean: who wants to read all the topics above? But it helped me a lot to
remind myself that I blog, primarily, for myself. I am my own target audience! Everybody else comes second.)
I certainly have more things that I want to blog about than that I actually do. And even for the things I start, I often don’t finish: I’ve got
literally hundreds of incomplete drafts, and perhaps even more “concepts” noted down in Obsidian that I’ve never even started writing about.
It’s all a little skewed right now because I’ve kinda been trying to achieve the #100DaysToOffload challenge – which I’ve achieved for six consecutive years so far – in the first hundred days of 2026! Given that it’s called “100 Days To
Offload” I don’t feel like it’s legitimate to claim it for 100 blog posts that aren’t on different days (otherwise I’d have achieved it already, with about 149 in the first 82
days of this year).
So yeah: I’m currently working towards a hundred-day streak, and that’s almost certainly having me blog more than I might “organically”. To that
end, I’m often digging out old drafts and finalising them, right now, or else being more “impulsive” in my blogging, compared to the norm. This lunchtime, for example, I took a cycle,
and it gave me a sense of normalcy that’s been somewhat missing in my life recently, and I considered writing a blog post about the experience. Impulsive, y’see!
But in general… my “process”, such as it is… is that I just look at what interests me today. There’s no secret to blogging as prolifically as I do: you’ve
just got to start writing, and then keep writing. That’s all there is to it.
