WordPress gives me a place that is clearly for managing content. Not building, not configuring, not upgrading a toolchain. Writing. That matters more to me now than whether the site is statically generated, server-rendered, or deployed from Git.

spending the time to author a long-form piece of content, which requires a more thoughtful processing and conveying of information.

Taking the writing process seriously means not accepting one-size-fits-all ‘writing tips’. You need to find a source of writing insight that addresses your general writing situation and that resonates with your specific approach to writing.

Choose your blogging platform based on your needs, not on what all the cool kids are using.

Trying to shoehorn something you’re writing into the framework of a story can make it look like you’re trying to shoehorn it into the framework of a story.

What you should be aiming for is a core of enthusiastic, engaged readers. I’d rather have 100 engaged readers than 1,000 casual ones. People who keep coming back because what I’ve written is helpful, is interesting, and speaks to them.

This is the first part I reject. The moving things around is precisely what thinking and writing involves. It's where ideas are born and cultivated, shaped to become what we have in mind. The rearranging of words to capture an incipient thought is the struggle and joy of being a writer.

Shortly after I began producing Rebecca's Pocket I noticed two side effects I had not expected. First, I discovered my own interests. I thought I knew what I was interested in, but after linking stories for a few months I could see that I was much more interested in science, archaeology, and issues of injustice than I had realized. More importantly, I began to value more highly my own point of view. In composing my link text every day I carefully considered my own opinions and ideas, and I began to feel that my perspective was unique and important.

Authenticity is in short supply and seems to be the only way forward, for so much of what we see is manufactured, tailored, and designed to show something that doesn’t exist. Imperfection is the mark of the human, the spelling mistakes, the last minute word addition because you misspoke on a video, it’s all more real because of this. We can strive to glorify the Creator with creation, and that will always be more enjoyable than the sterile veil over what could be authentic.

I don’t have anything against people monetizing their thoughts - though I’m rarely compelled by a paywall. Digital patronage and crowdfunding seems highly relevant to get out of the social media hell realm of today. It has pitfalls, the main one being requiring mass adoption which seems highly delusional.

Don’t get me wrong– I’d rather have more blogs than no blogs so if that’s your situation don’t mind me and my niche beef. But consider for a moment that I can’t tell you the last Medium post I’ve read because they’re all the same to me. I follow a lot of UX and design systems blogs… but I can’t tell you a single person who writes on Medium. Those posts and authors have all blended together into a monolithic groupthinkpiece where individual voices and personality are flattened by the über theme.

Of course blogging isn’t just writing. It’s a way of seeing the world with fresh eyes. Blogging is a mindset.

Writing blog posts, for example, is something that benefits from a steady rhythm. When I had that in previous years, it felt easier to show up and publish consistently. Once that cadence broke, getting back into it requires more effort than I expected, even though my desire to write has never left.

Like anything in life, you can only get better if you practice. Your first blog post will probably not be great, nor your second, maybe not even your third. But you should write them anyway. The more you write, the more you can improve your writing. You will need to read other blog posts and articles and incorporate different ways of writing to your own. You can only be a good writer, if you practice. So… practice on your own blog!

How to archive, index and search? I recently re-architected how search works on my site. It’s not finished yet but I hope to use search as a way to search not only my site but all kinds of other stuff: my bookmarks, my wiki, my notes, my tweets even. Search can be a way to go down rabbitholes.

How do you create pathways (and desire paths?) through your site? How do people start, journey, get lost and ultimately find their way through your site?

First was a couple months ago, when I visited my parents for the first time in a while. My sister still lives in my hometown and has a beautiful new baby boy, so came over to see me. I love kids, so spent a long time enjoying my time with both of them, but once play time was over, I went to grab my computer, and began to type out some listicle of some kind. I forget which it was. She asked what I was doing. I told her, and then she asked me ‘do you ever give yourself a rest from your computer?’This proved a powerful moment for me, because just as many words as I say on my Sports Passion Project, I say in real life. I’m a talkative human. I’ve got an answer for everything, and yet, all it took was this one yes/no question to leave me completely speechless. I had no answer to it.

First was a couple months ago, when I visited my parents for the first time in a while. My sister still lives in my hometown and has a beautiful new baby boy, so came over to see me. I love kids, so spent a long time enjoying my time with both of them, but once play time was over, I went to grab my computer, and began to type out some listicle of some kind. I forget which it was. She asked what I was doing. I told her, and then she asked me ‘do you ever give yourself a rest from your computer?’This proved a powerful moment for me, because just as many words as I say on my Sports Passion Project, I say in real life. I’m a talkative human. I’ve got an answer for everything, and yet, all it took was this one yes/no question to leave me completely speechless. I had no answer to it.

I’m not going to guarantee a post every Monday any longer. I’m not going to post most days on Notes and elsewhere any longer. SPP is going to continue on much more of an ad hoc basis moving forward. When I have something to say, I will say it, but on days and weeks where I have nothing to say, I will not say anything, and I will make no apology beyond this one.

But here's the crux of the matter: I've been blogging for roughly 10 days and many of my posts have been about blogging. I love it as a topic, and I find it quite interesting, but surely I need to break through this obstacle if I want to use this platform in the most rewarding way. One day, when I'm older and looking back at past posts, I won't be really interested in musings about Bear. I'll probably want to know what 2026-me thought of a film they watched, or a book they read, or a day trip somewhere where grass is lush and there's no buildings in sight.

I also want people to follow me for the way I write. I don’t always like writing concise intros, I like taking the scenic route. If you’re not into that sort of thing, I totally understand, but my blog might not be the best one for you to read.

Personally though, the only action I could take, and have, is run a blog on my domain which lets me truly own my thoughts and connections to people on the Web. Maybe you could do that too. In such little corners of the Internet, there are no algorithms shaping content based on hollow likes or reposts. And no public list of followers to race for. Just humans sharing stuff and interacting at will.

The benefits of this loose writing for the writer are many, as a blog can serve equal parts as a means to learn what you think, a collaborative tool, a way to do something and tell people about it and a commonplace book. Meanwhile, as readers, we also get to tap into all that ‘instantaneity’ that often gets scrubbed from books. How often otherwise do we really get to hear someone thinking out loud as their thoughts emerge at our own reading pace? And yes, I think this extends to fiction blogs, poetry blogs and modern weblog alternatives such as digital gardens alike.

Instead of waiting for that aha moment to arrive, I suggest doing the opposite. Start writing even when you have no idea what to write about. More often than not, it really helps.

What can you do to prolong its life? It's very simple. Don't go niche. Blog about whatever you feel like. Some posts get more attention than others. It's not important.

For the record, my posts aren’t written or conceived with an LLM, although I know an increasing number of people who use one to write a first draft and then edit. I’m not a fan. The whole point of the web — its beauty — is that it’s unrelentingly human and diverse.

You know, the e-books basically were a way for somebody who wanted to read my content in a book format, with a flow to it and things like that.

You mentioned that many of your blog posts begin as small moments of curiosity and questioning about the world around you and your clients’ experiences.

being comfortable with not knowing is part of blogging. Sometimes I’m putting stuff out there, and I don’t know if it’s any good, I don’t know if it makes any sense, but I gotta get it out there, and let’s see what happens. There’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t go any further than a blog post. It is what it is. It’s my process of trying to make sense of things.

this year, I decided that I would get back in the game. My objective is to write one blog post per week. I’ll be happy if I can do that. But I’m also conscious that anything that I put up is going to be scraped, which makes me sort of think that I’m feeding the beast, but there are a number of people who have asked me to keep writing.

It became my business card: “Do you want to know something about me? Go to my blog, read some articles, see what you think, and then maybe you want to hire me after that.”

In those early days, the only way to communicate with people was in the blogosphere. I guess that’s where I sort of sharpened my ability to write.

But there wasn’t a whole bunch of work in the local area where I lived. I was looking at cheap ways for professional development and cheap ways for marketing to get things started. Then a friend suggested, “Why don’t you do a blog?” My current blog started in 2004. It was a way for me to reach out and to talk to people, and in those days of blogging, there were a lot of people who were helping others out, because there were so few of us, particularly in the educational technology area, where I was doing a lot of writing initially, and later in knowledge management.

My two most visited apps

The act of making your log-file public requires a rigor that keeping personal notes does not. Writing for a notional audience — particularly an audience of strangers — demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I’m taking notes for myself. I am much better at kidding myself my ability to interpret my notes at a later date than I am at convincing myself that anyone else will be able to make heads or tails of them. Writing for an audience keeps me honest.

Peter “peterme” Merholz coined the term “blog” as a playful contraction of “web-log” — like a ship’s log in which hardy adventurers upon the chaotic virtual seas could record their journeys.

There’s a version of the “why writers should blog” story that is tawdry and mercenary: “Blog,” the story goes, “and you will build a brand and a platform that you can use to promote your work.” Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is bullshit, and that one is no exception.

OLDaily exists because of my practice of paraphrasing anything I read

Old graybeards like me still cling to the web, idolizing Yahoo Pipes and posting faux thinkpieces to our tiny blogs.

Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research — it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet. It’s a way to discover what your future books and essays and stories and speeches will be about.

Matt GrossMatt Gross (He/Him) • 1st (He/Him) • 1st Vice President, Digital Initiatives at Archetype MediaVice President, Digital Initiatives at Archetype Media 4d • 4d • So, here's an interesting project I launched two weeks ago: The HistoryNet Podcast, a mostly automated transformation of HistoryNet's archive of 25,000+ stories into an AI-driven daily podcast, powered by Instaread and Zapier. The voices are pretty good! The stories are better than pretty good! The implications are... maybe terrifying? Curious to hear what you think. Listen at https://lnkd.in/emUTduyC or, as they always say, "wherever you get your podcasts."

Some of my better type casts start out as handwritten, though not often. In this mode, the typewriter isn’t a creation platform, more like the publishing medium, which I still prefer over word processed.

While social media emphasizes the show-off stuff — the vacation in Puerto Vallarta, the full kitchen remodel, the night out on the town — on blogs it still seems that people are sharing more than signalling.

使用 Heptabase 管理数字花园

这和我运用的卡片笔记法理念一致，通过不断的积累、迭代卡片完成文章的输出，而不是一来就面对一张白纸一步到位完成创作。

博客 vs 数字花园 数字花园的理念与我正在使用的卡片笔记法、Heptabase 的设计哲学更加贴近，所以放弃了持续 1 年的博客，改用数字花园的方式维护自己的个人站点，下面会详细介绍一下原因。

尝试过 HUGO 和 Notion 等方式、研究了 obsidian publish，也实践用 Notion 维护了一年的博客，但一直没有找到比较理想的方案。

Starting a blog .t3_16v8tfq._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } Hey everyone- I’m still trying to wrap my head on how to organize this.I have my antinet growing and I want to start a blog with the use of one of my notes as a springboard.Do I9 votesWork on the blog and store the index cards after the note that I’m drawing inspiration fromCreate a new blog section in my antinet and place them thereStore them in wherever and create an hub note that points to them

“Typecasting” used to be a thing where people would type a post, scan/take a photo of it, and post it on a blog or social media

engineering blogs focus on problems where the solution is a necessary but not sufficient part of what they do. And, ideally, they focus on problems that are complementary to scale that only the publisher of that post has.

How do you organize all of the things you read? My system is actually pretty simple, and it relies on organizing my regular reads, quick digesting and sorting one-off articles, and sometimes doing extensive note-taking with online apps.

Digital gardening is the Domestic Cozy response to the professional personal blog; it's both intimate and public, weird and welcoming.

This weblog is a mnemonic device.

one problem was that i had collected too many quotes and excerpts that i wanted to weave into the post and couldn’t find good spots for them, so here they are anyway.

Mastodon is just blogs and Google Reader, skinned to look like Twitter.

A tool that turns Twitter threads into blog posts, by Darius Kazemi.

manton Interesting post by @simon@simonwillison.net that Mastodon is just blogs. Except Mastodon’s design runs counter to blog features like domain names and custom designs. I’d say Mastodon is more Twitter-like than blog-like… Which is fine, but not the same as a blog-first platform.

Originally blogs were called weblogs: a log of activity that you wrote to the web. Peter Merholz jokingly split the term into two words to make it an activity: we blog. Ev Williams started to use it as a verb and a noun: to blog. And the rest is history.

often say that my PKM approach is technology-neutral. I do not promote one tool about another. I share my top tools but do not ask others to use them. But it seems I do have a chosen technology — the blog.

Anybody who writes knows you don’t simply write what you believe. You write to find out what you believe, or what you can afford to believe. So when I write something and it sounds good, I leave it in, usually, to see what it sounds like to someone else. To somebody else it might sound awful or brash, but I want to be able to have the courage of my brashness. I don’t leave things in that I know to be terrible, or that I don’t, as it were, find interesting—I don’t do that—but if there’s a doubt about it and it sounds interesting, I’ll leave it in. And I want to be free to do that, because that’s why I write. When I write, things occur to me. It’s a way of thinking. But you can perform your thinking instead of just thinking it.

The freedom to play with ideas, and to explore new ways of thinking, critiquing, deploying, and analyzing ed tech provided by metaphors, is much needed if we are to develop a better appreciation of its possibilities, implications, and limitations.

I have found that the "size of a thought" is usually not much larger than 500 words. Nicholson Baker, who has written an essay on "The Size of Thoughts" thinks that "most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product." Mine are a lot smaller. It takes between 50 and 500 words for me to express one thought or one idea (or perhaps better a fragment of a thought or an idea, because thoughts and ideas usually are compounds of such fragments). See also Steven Berlin Johnson on his experiences with an electronic outliner, called Devonthink: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html.

Blog posts with images get 2.3x more engagement.

I knew if I wanted this website – which is an extension of my consciousness – to truly thrive, I needed to work on it in a sustainable manner. Bit by bit I slowly transformed the way I thought about it. Previously I would only work on it if I had the energy to make wholesale, dramatic changes. These days I am glad if I made one small change.

At the same time, like Harold, I’ve realised that it is important to do things, to keep blogging and writing in this space. Not because of its sheer brilliance, but because most of it will be crap, and brilliance will only occur once in a while. You need to produce lots of stuff to increase the likelihood of hitting on something worthwile. Of course that very much feeds the imposter cycle, but it’s the only way. Getting back into a more intensive blogging habit 18 months ago, has helped me explore more and better. Because most of what I blog here isn’t very meaningful, but needs to be gotten out of the way, or helps build towards, scaffolding towards something with more meaning.

Some readers may be solely interested in sharing their knowledge with the world. Writing and expressing thoughts for these kinds of readers is enough reward and motivation to blog on a regular basis. It’s their way of giving back by sharing a part of themselves for the benefit of others.

If you want to write a book, you could dial down the scope andwrite a series of online articles outlining your main ideas. If youdon’t have time for that, you could dial it down even further andstart with a social media post explaining the essence of yourmessage.

The summary of Hoy’s post makes a point similar to Caulfield’s piece, but more pronounced: the wide-spread adoption of the blog format killed gardens. The dichotomy is the same; here, we also have a causality of demise.

Twitter is for shitposting, blogs are for thinking.