You Should Blog Even If No One Reads It

I have a number of "blogs" I put posts on, hosted on my own server, running my own domains, and I write for me. It's good practice.

I can say, quite emphatically, that I do not write to be read and would not enjoy writing to be read or to have a following.

I can say that, again, quite emphatically, that I write to write, not to be read, because I did blog for a few years, with the intention of being read, which turned what I enjoy in to an endless grind of trying to please or chase the next interesting topic so that I could be read, and after a few years, the audience did grow, and I made I little money, and I hated every day of it. I constantly ran in to people online who threatened me with unsubscribing should I dare even t mention a particular topic or hold an opinion that didn't align perfectly with their ever shifting idea of acceptable.

I also have written many, many, many, many articles for various industry and trade magazines on the topics of software development, technology, and so forth, and made quite a bit of money at it, and a reasonable name for myself, and again, I turned something I enjoyed doing into something I didn't really enjoy doing. And the money, in the end, wasn't all that great, but the name recognition helped, right up until it didn't because I dared to write something that a HR person at a company disagreed with.

I write, because I want to capture my thoughts.

I write, because I want to write.

I write, for my own amusement.

I loving writing, but I don't want to be a writer. I love cooking, but I don't want to be a chef. I love building furniture, but I don't want to be a cabinetmaker. I love 3D printing, but I don't want to run a service bureau.

One thought a day, written down, sometimes with a sketch or a photo attached, every day, for the past 44 years.

I completely agree with the sentiment of this article. I would add the additional point that making content for your own blog is the only way to actually accrue a stack of writing that you actually own. Commenting on new.ycombinator/stackoverflow/medium/etc is fine but others own your content and all you get are internet points. On my own site, what I write is mine.

I have an extremely low traffic blog. Its nice to occasionally get a spike in readership but that is not the point.

I presume no one reads what I write - but attempt to write as if it's being read by millions

I couldn't agree more. The price to pay for using sometimes unusual, old or simply less popular software or hardware configurations is that if you encounter a problem, good luck finding someone who solved it and published the solution, and that solution wasn't deleted along with that Geocities page hosting it. I have some more stringent issues to solve by now (health, relocation, etc) but plan to put online a small home hosted static technical oriented site where I record any interesting findings that might be useful to others. For that I plan to use what broadband connection I will have available plus DuckDNS to solve the inevitable dynamic IP issue. The main problem that might arise could be letting search engines crawlers index the page as I believe they might want to skip those hosted on home broadband connections.

I maintained a blog for a good 10 years, and even got some readership and (generally positive) feedback and one day I found that I just couldn't drag myself to write for it any more, no matter how hard I tried to force myself.

You should blog LIKE no one reads it. ;-)

Nice article! I also use the blog to link to it in online discussions and my blog is 18 years old there is wuite some stuff in there.

I did this for nearly five years until the birth of a child took the remaining free time I had. I highly recommend it.

Don't worry that it's not good enough... for anyone else to hear...

You should consider keeping a diary/journal if you don't expect anyone to read your blog.

good points