If you do a project, you should write about it.

I recommend adding “write about it” to your definition of “done” for anything that you build or create.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I’m drawn to blogging because it makes me happy on several levels. I love sharing what I’ve learned. I love entertaining people and spreading joy. I love having a collection of the topics I was interested in at various points in my life. I love being able to practice honing my writing skills. And I love having a place on the internet that is completely my own.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

I built my own Ruby on Rails app to handle it. I chose it because I wanted to get better at writing Rails apps.

I’ve had a personal website since 1998. It’s had many iterations and name changes and designs. I miss building websites for fun. So I’m doing it again because hey, it’s still fun as hell to do cool things with these computers of ours.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Oh yeah. At first, it was all handwritten HTML, but I’ve tried a few different content management systems like Movable Type, LiveJournal, and Wordpress.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

My longer form pieces are often written in TextMate. I’ll launch a locally-running version of my site and test out formatting and whatnot before I copy and paste it into my production site.

My monthly observation posts are mostly a collection of my daily journalistic entries. Around the first day of the month, I’ll slowly re-read what I wrote about the previous month and edit the interesting nuggets down into something coherent.

For my link posts, I use a custom iPhone Shortcut. When I navigate to a URL in Safari that I wanna share here, my shortcut will grab whatever is in the <title>, then grab the URL sans any UTM or tracking params, then drop whatever I may have highlighted into a Markdown quote in a text field. I then type up my thoughts and hit publish.

This approach works great for me because there is almost zero friction to post. It only sucks when I accidentally close out of the text field, or when I write something substantially long¹. I also have to remember to navigate to the article to add tags. I should probably add that into the Shortcut process at some point.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

I’m the most inspired to write whenever my thoughts begin to run away. Writing forces me to grab hold of a single thread of my swirling inner dialogue and crystalize it.

When I got laid off last year, I decided to force myself to journal every single night. I didn’t lay any other parameters: I didn’t give myself any word counts or topics or agendas. Simply write.

Now that I have a journaling habit, I find that I write my thoughts down often throughout the day. I’m inspired to write whenever I make myself laugh, or whenever I feel a light bulb go off in my head, or whenever I need a break from my negative self talk.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

Short link posts are almost always published immediately. Longer posts will simmer for a day or two before I eventually force myself to publish. I am pretty diligent about editing things a day or two after that, as well. For this post, I’m gonna publish it as soon as I’m done here.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

I don’t have a favorite. Every single post I’ve made on here makes me cringe when I read it back, even if it’s only 24 hours later.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

I plan to keep writing. I should probably upgrade the Rails engine here soon.

I also have this idea of building a “garden” here. I came across the idea of a personal site being more like a garden, and I am really vibing with that sentiment. The first step for me is to build this cool 8-bit landscape entirely in vanilla CSS, HTML, and JS. From there, I’d like to have some self-composed, optimistic lo-fi playing in the background. As one sits in the scene, various phrases and quotes will fade in and out of view.²

I mentioned my journaling habit above, and I think another goal of mine for the year is to keep up the monthly observation posts. Writing down my thoughts is helpful, and getting a bit of distance from those thoughts gives me a fresh perspective of them.

Passing the torch

Despite seeing my own site show up in my feed on other people’s sites, I still feel like nobody ever reads this blog. So I’ll admit I felt incredibly dorky writing this post because it reminds me of how these sorts of things used to be hella prevalent back on the web when I was growing up.

But also: isn’t the point of doing these things to have fun and learn how other people approach a hobby that you’re interested in? These “challenges” serve as a collective bonding moment, an opportunity to collectively reflect on why we like this loose-knit community of goofy misfits who know what an RSS feed is.

So here’s how I’ll pass the torch: if you’ve seen these kinds of posts pop up in your own feeds these past couple weeks, copy this and do it yourself and shoot me a note when you’re done. I guarantee you’ll get at least one other person here who will be interested in your stories! 🙋‍♂️

Many of these kinds of retrospectives contain graphs of views over time or the most popular posts; but I’m not showing it to you because I can’t—I don’t keep any statistics whatsoever.

I don’t really care—and I don’t want to care—about how many readers I have or what posts are and aren’t popular. I worry that if I add statistics to the blog it’ll change from an activity I perform for the activity’s sake, to an exercise in hunting clicks where I write for others instead of for myself.

If I were chasing views I would certainly not have continued to blog for as long as I have, and I’d have missed out on the many benefits I’ve gotten from the blog.

I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment.

I do thoroughly enjoy when people reach out and tell me they read the blog, but I don’t share things here for the social clout.

I share things on here because the act of curating thoughts through the writing process brings me so much joy and clarity.

I’ve been meaning to write something longer form on here for a while, but all my good long thoughts have been sent to Monkey Wrench.

But this post made me reflect on my own blogging journey. I started blogging in a LiveJournal at some point in the early 2000s. I bought my own domain and moved my thoughts over there in 2004. I blogged from a pseudonym starting in 2006 up through college. I bought this domain while sitting in a TV production class my senior year of college and started a fresh blog.

It’s been a while since I burned the stack to the ground and started fresh, but ever since I started building websites for a living, it stopped being fun to do it in my free time.

Like many people I’ve been dealing with the collapses of the various systems I relied on for information over the previous decades. After 17 of using Twitter daily and 24 years of using Google daily neither really works anymore. And particular with the collapse of the social spaces many of us grew up with, I feel called back to earlier forms of the Internet, like blogs, and in particular, starting a link blog.

One of us! One of us!

This isn’t a lengthy post, but I damn near quoted the whole thing because Kellan makes great points about the state of information sharing, the collapse of the Web 2.0 social infrastructure we all used for twenty years, and lamenting the fact he doesn’t really consume media from a wide variety of sources (me too, friend).

If you’re reading my link blog here, consider starting one of your own. Make it low effort for yourself, but just start one and stick to it for a month.

I think you’ll find your media consumption habits begin to trend toward higher quality sources of information/entertainment.

But I will share the Google Analytics graph below that I pulled tonight — mostly because it makes me happy and maybe it will inspire some of you to stick with it. Remember, the flatline you see early on in 2006 is basically what things looked like from 2004 until that point.

Inspiring post from MG Siegler. Be sure to check that graph out.

Wait, you guys don't think I'm lame, do you?