Reflections on 25 Years of Blogging | Hacker News Reader

Reflections on 25 Years of Blogging

interconnected.org

18 pointsgenmon12 comments

I started blogging in February 2000 (it was social like Twitter back then). 5 years ago, I ramped up my writing again: I've been posted at least weekly for 256 weeks.

I've learnt that blogging is a necessary part of my practice for finding and exploring new ideas. It's brought me work and friends. And there's especially a place for blogging today: no platform will value your words like you will yourself.

I have always wondered if blogging could be a way of getting out those side project ideas that I know I will never get around to.

It's super handy to have a place to put everything. So I can make a dumb iOS app and just announce it on my blog, without having to think about landing pages, hosting etc etc. Just lowers the barrier

That is a good point. The admin of creating small projects is as much hassle as the project and often requires more maintenance. I have the site ready to go, I just need to get into the habit of doing it I think.

Anecdotally blogging has helped me finish and even expand side projects.

I usually have ~10 drafts of different posts and many of them are basically "project logs" that I transform into a post over days/weeks/months.

Is that thing continuously changing its background color, or am I on LSD?

now hit / to activate cursor chat...

having 25 years of body of work is incredibly inspiring. i have been blogging irregularly since... 2004? but sadly some is lost to time before like 2009 or 2011. i definitely want to get back to it again more.

my absolute top tip would be to find your super low-friction way to capture ideas about what to write, wherever you are, the very second the idea occurs to you

idea capture is upstream of everything else. you can do drafting or editing a month later or a year later, when the mood comes

I wrote a Colophon recently about my blog tech stack. it includes a "Writing" section which touches on how I start with idea capture (and also the psychological blockers about doing everything else)

https://interconnected.org/home/2024/10/28/colophon

https://www.bearblog.dev is one of the least friction ways I am aware of to start blogging.

Looks pretty nice for a hosted platform solution. I'd argue that even lower friction in some ways is just installing a Nostr relay (heck, it can be to your phone through the app store) and pointing a long form Nostr client at it like Yakihonne. Probably would also want to point to one or two other relays just to get it out there to the world, but having your own relay ensures that you've always got your work backed up, and that nobody could possibly censor what you're writing.

Guess it's not QUITE as quick to set up as creating a login, but considering the resiliency you get from it it's pretty darn painless. Best of all Nostr is all key based logins, so just think about those seconds you save typing in usernames and passwords!

Also handy in that if you're involved with other work across Nostr, it's all tied right back through that identity. Be it podcasts (fountain.fm), livestreaming (zap.stream), static video content (flare.pub), travel content (satlantis.io), or whatever else you may be playing with.

Any chance the Internet Archive might have caught some of the stuff you're missing?

I restored some of my content from there a few years ago: https://simonwillison.net/2017/Oct/8/missing-content/

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