Blogging Through the Decades
bcantrill.dtrace.org
bcantrill.dtrace.org
As for "conclusions"... I also hit the 2-decade mark earlier this year (https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/20-years-of-blogging) and I can spot similar thoughts to mine: blogging has evolved from short/informal posts to longer-form more structured pieces, and the smaller "throw-away" articles that one would write in the past now happen in other platforms like Twitter or Reddit. Which matches... the trend for everyone else too?
I do that occasionally, mostly to reshare on social media or here. Gotta chase those karma points.
But sometimes someone will ask a question in slack or via email that reminds me "I wrote something about that once!" and I'll dig up a piece to share.
As a gift for a family member who had a non-technical blog, I once gathered posts together, edited them, and turned them into a book. That was a ton of fun.
A curated and subscribable list of smaller authors categorised by area, where the sites aren't wall-gardened and laiden with trackers, would seem to fit the bill.
Also, newsletters and blogs are not so different in the end, as prior newsletter editions are easily available on modern platforms like Substack and others, while also allowing for easy monetization of any or all posts, a feature popularized by Patreon that has percolated through the industry.
You might also look into so-called starter packs, a new-ish feature of Bluesky, which, along with Mastodon, has been another new source of authors for me lately.
If it weren't public, I don't think I'd do it. I've rarely kept a journal or diary.
I hear you about AI, though. Aren't there headers you can add to dissuade those crawlers?
To me that's this. I never cared for analytics and knowing how many people read what I write. But it appears I care about AI benefiting from it. There is no way to prevent them from stealing my content, so I may as well not publish it at all.
Now? Forget about it. As far as I'm concerned, my notes and learning experiments are private. I didn't create that world, valley techbros did. I'm not big enough for OAI to sign a licensing deal with me, but apparently I'm powerless enough that they can scrape my blog posts and Github packages and credit my work as their own.
If I share my learnings in the future, it will be for a free class or webinar, for an audience of real people. Y'know, the way the internet used to be.
* Keeping the blogging stack minimal helps. Using simple tools has helped me focus entirely on the content. For instance, I write everything in Google Docs and then manually convert it to HTML.
* It is beyond okay to feel stuck, especially with technical content. I often have several partially written drafts sitting around. Revisiting these drafts periodically helps me see them with fresh perspectives. Eventually, inspiration strikes, and I end up finishing those half-baked drafts.
* It helps to avoid obsessing over analytics. I have intentionally avoided analytics, and it has kinda allowed me to focus on topics that genuinely interest me, rather than writing solely to please some imaginary audience. It kind of gives me the freedom to explore obscure subjects, even if they appeal to only a small number of my readers.
Maybe it was only in the group of sites I followed, but I think that name was pretty common.
SA has a reference from 2000 that suggests it's a little bit different than a blog.