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Similar to the benefits I've found of actually committing to a blog for the past... 8 years. Wow.
The major benefits I've found:
- I can "flush from active storage" anything I've written as a blog post. I know myself well enough to trust that anything weird, non-intuitive, or otherwise "would be helpful for doing this again in the future" will be documented in the post - so I can genuinely just forget everything about the project after I've written it up.
- It encourages me to actually finish projects. I had a problem with a lot of "85% done" things, and it was both physical and mental clutter. They need to be finished to write about them, so I both get them finished and documented - freeing up both physical and mental space.
- If I want to respond to something in a longer, more thought out form, I can. I've done this over the years, though it's less useful than it used to be - responding to the 500th time someone asks the same question with a link to your blog is now considered "self promotion" and therefore banned on lots of places I no longer bother with on the internet.
- I occasionally get down weird rabbit holes and have months of post material from something that I simply can't find much information on. LED lighting (blue light, human health, sleep, etc), kerosene lanterns (beautiful, useful, and good winter heat in the deal), and an 11k word epic on lead acid batteries that should have been a few posts.
I'll just say, having learned the hard way, own your hosting and pipeline. I tend to write on a lot of "gutless wonder" grade machines, and after Blogger ruined their interface for anyone without a Google-grade workstation, I ended up moving to my own hosting and Jekyll for rendering. It's now possible for me to move my (static file) hosting just about anywhere, and I'm not reliant on other people to not break that which I rely on. Don't suffer the pain of using someone else's platform, and learning in a few years that you have to migrate off. It's much easier to just use your own, and if you want to refactor things later, well, you just do it.
Great to see someone writing this as a structured thought. Thank you!
I would add one thing that someone recently said to me and I felt it was the core reason of why I write blog-style docs (for my team or the general internet populace): "These are notes to myself so I can structure learnings and not repeat my own mistakes."
Similar to your thought on "Distilling information" but a bit of a nuance that I think is worth highlighting.
My own reasons for blogging:
- Know what I think. Writing it down makes me think a lot more about it.
- Share what I have learnt. It's nice if something I know becomes useful for somebody else.
- Venting. From time to time there are things that annoy me, or ways of working that I don’t like. Then I can write a blog post and argue how things should be instead.
- To learn. Often comments on the posts, or discussions here or at Reddit add to my understanding.
- To better remember. Reviewing a book or a course helps me remember a lot more of the content.
- The thrill of having readers
- Visibility. If people google me, hopefully the top result is my blog.
- As an archive. I can send people links to my blog if we discuss something I have written about in the past.
https://henrikwarne.com/2017/11/26/6-years-of-thoughts-on-pr...
I write for 10 minutes every day. No word limit/count to hit. Just 10 minutes. It’s a surprisingly effective way to “flush” my head and get on with my life.
It’s become part journal, part newsletter fuel, and part self documentation. I have no specific goal when my fingers hit the keyboard other than writing for 10 minutes.
And it’s glorious to see where my thoughts take me. Sometimes I get so wrapped up I come out on the other side, an hour later and 1500 words lighter. Other times I struggle to even make a coherent sentence.
Removing the need to be polished and perfect, I free myself to write as a stream of conscious. If I could disable my backspace key I would. Pops in my head = write it down. A surprisingly freeing exercise that I look forward to each morning.
And if you’re curious, https://masilotti.com/articles - you can see how I go from “serious” stuff to more fun, and then swing back the pendulum a few times. Enjoy!
Thank you for the writeup, this will encourage me to blog. I have some domain names stored away, but it's been hard tackling those on right now, Shodan is sending me ssl expiration notices on the blogs I mantain for instance. I like the part about being replaceable particularly as I have not thought about that angle before, but I guess it comes down to the bus factor somewhat as well.
Desire to become replaceable in order to continue working on new things is a refreshing take. It is a more positive, and imo, more realistic outlook than the usual one, which is more like, _I will be replaced and no longer be valuable/needed_.
On a slight tangent, I love reading the first posts of a blog. Especially when the subsequent posts are about the person building or designing said blog. It it’s really hard to find those kinds of posts or blogs. All the results on google are blog spam articles about making money with a blog.
Can anyone recommend some?
Here’s one of my favourite examples.
I started collecting personal blogs on my site. You can find links here https://manuelmoreale.com/personal-blogs
At that point you can just go to the first entry and see if it’s something that’s of interest to you.
I also collected some 1000+ sites on https://theforest.link and I’d say a solid 80% are probably personal blogs.
So hopefully there’s at least a few of those firsts posts you’re talking about in there.
I like your blog setup.I use HTMLy for mine. Though the recent iteration seems to have a few bugs i need to go back and fix (im not the creator of HTMLy, but i like the fact that its all php and .md files, not database etc)
I cant bring myself to talk about much more than stuff i build or do in tech in mine. I'm too concerned with me saying something controversial and it causing me issues in the real world.
And sometimes even struggle to post. No one reads it so its fine though. I find it helps me parse out my thoughts.
I did go ahead and add mine to your list though.
> I'm too concerned with me saying something controversial and it causing me issues in the real world.
I can't obviously comment on this since I don't know about your specific situation. My experience is that as long as you try to be honest and open to dialogue, online interactions are great. I had my blog since 2017 and I had nothing but enjoyable conversations with people via email.
Nice list and blog you have. You now have one subscriber more to your RSS feed. By the way, I disagree with your stance on RSS excerpts. ;)
Can you tell me why? I’m always interested in hearing from people with different opinions.
Well, I really get your point. If I would use RSS mainly for it's newspaper-like newsreader function, excerpts would indeed be the last thing I want. Just give me the full article, in that case.
I foresee another function for RSS. I call it Really Social Sites, and what I do with it is more like a timeline. A timeline that you see at regular social media. My site offers it's own feed to the web, but it also has a reader-function where I follow all kinds of websites. So far nothing different. Except that I can only see short excerpts from the sites I follow. I do this on purpose, because I think it's important to visit the site. I think it's respectful, because people put effort in their sites, people want to know - at least a little bit - how many visitors they had, maybe also where these visitors came from. And from a user point of view, while visiting somebody's website you might stumble upon something unexpectedly nice. One might be compelled to leave a message for the site owner on some contact form after a good article. Etc.
Thank you for explaining this. I see what you mean and it’s great that you want to take the extra step to actually visit the site rather than consuming content directly on the feed.
It’s something I also do I’d say 70% of the time. Some sites are just too enjoyable to browse and I prefer to read there.
Others are not so great (bad typography and bad colors can make the reading experience very unpleasant) and I read on my RSS in those cases.
Which is why I think full content in rss feeds should be the way to go. It allows me to chose how to consume the content.
If you only serve excerpts I have no other option but to read on the site even if the reading experience is terrible.
Maybe the solution here is to have two feeds?
I recently redesigned mine, here's the post about it: https://heitorpb.github.io/bla/rewriting-in-rust/
And if you look a list of all entries, there's my "hello world" there as well.
I have rewritten my blog a few times...
From a static HTML/CSS site to Ruby on Rails. From Rails to a pure Go MVC with my own templating format. From the custom Go server to static HTML/CSS on Github pages; to finally a Next.js with server side rendering and using markdown with frontmatter.
I think the point of blogging is to do crazy things you can't get away with at work :)
In addition to the positives already outlined the two biggest gains for me blogging are
* Producing better documentation in a work capacity (that is, blogging has meant that the documentation that i produce at work has greatly improved).
* Providing an outlet for me to "talk" about the things, in detail, that I have fallen in love with.
I blog to clear my head. Usually at the point I write a blog posts it’s because I’ve had something on my mind and I know I won’t stop thinking about it until I write it down.
It works too. Sometimes other people even read it.
Biggest benefit for me personally is the random interactions with people across the world that write in after they read something on my site.
Being able to exchange thoughts and ideas with different people is priceless.
Because you can't code.
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