The best time to start blogging was twenty years ago. The second best is today - having a personal blog is an investment that just keeps on compounding over time, even if you only post things there a few times a year.
I kept putting off making a blog because I thought the market must be saturated by now, who will even care?
It turns out the only one who needs to care is yourself!
I recently bought a random domain and my very first post went up towards the end of April. I kinda knew I wanted to write about gaming, and I feel it’s slowly developing and a core concept is forming every day that goes by.
I don’t really care about up to date gaming news and reviews, it turned out I’m interested looking back on my own history of gaming and talking about anything gaming adjacent I love so I write about those things, and hope other people can relate! I have dabbled in an attempt at an SEO post as well but it was for a game I am actively playing so doesn’t seem too disingenuous!
People shouldn’t get bogged down about what to write, you’ll eventually discover what you want to do the more you actually do it. It’s like a muscle!
Mine'll be 23 years old in November. I don't post much anymore, but I'm trying to get back in the habit. http://mischeathen.com
Early on, it was a couple hundred posts a year, but I got really politically engaged in the wake of the 2000 election and that helped encourage activity. Busiest year was 2007, with 1,147 posts.
Last year was only 28, but I'm nearly at that for 2023 already. Less politics now, more writing, and more just sharing stuff. I need to hook up the share-to-Mastodon thing since I'm obviously no longer sharing to Twitter.
Mine's been through several platforms -- first Blogger, then to Grey Matter, then Blosxom (whose simplicity I really miss), and for a few years on Movable Type, before landing (obviously) on Wordpress in 2012. I had comments for a while, but that became untenable, and also less rewarding in the era of social media.
Early on, when corporate sites were typically hosted IN HOUSE, like in the same building that business got done in, it was fun to look through the logs and see recognizable domains -- a buddy's law firm in NY, etc. Eventually when colos took over that stopped being as easy to do, and that I look back at doing so fondly probably dates me.
How did you deal with all those migrations? I have a blog from 2010 with around 450 posts and it's been through several migrations and it's getting more and more painful to do them, with many manual interventions needed.
I've tried to start blogging many times. But I always find I have nothing to speak about. I also have this mental hurdle of thinking my blog's have to be super serious and professional. This time around I'm trying to take myself less seriously and treat it as a way to store things I'd like to remember in the future.
> But I always find I have nothing to speak about.
Odds are you do have something interesting to speak about. Many people are experts in very niche things and don't even realize it. You may be very proficient with a niche piece of software that is not well documented, or may have created software to solve a very specific problem. Writing blog posts about your niche knowledge can be tremendously helpful; I can't tell you how many times a single blog post about an obscure problem has saved me hours (possibly even days or weeks) of research when I've encountered the same problem.
I feel like I never understand anything well enough to tell other people about it - the bare information I have can easily be acquired by anyone else without reading anything I write so my writing is a waste of time (when it comes to writing for other people anyway)
Everyone learns things in a different order and in different ways, so an alternative explanation or source of information can still be valuable. Sometimes I have an important realization simply because something I'd already known for years was presented from a different angle, or maybe just because I rediscovered it in a more fitting moment of my life.
And if someone doesn't find it useful, well, they'll just stop reading and go somewhere else.
Often writing for yourself (“how I did x when I didn’t know how”) is useful enough without being an expert on the subject. You can refer back to it later on if you forgot how you did it, or someone else who was in your shoes will appreciate it. Also makes things less daunting (“hey others are going through the same as me”).
I find the amount of interesting things I have to say correlates strongly with the amount of quality reading I do. It doesn't have to be related to what I'm saying. Like I've been inspired to write about technology by reading Herodetos.
I think it's useful to view your mind as a garden. If you plant nothing then all you'll grow is weeds. If you get rid of the weeds and plant interesting ideas by engaging with new ideas, then it will grow interesting ideas on its own.
TLDR version: publish TILs (Today I Learned) since then there's no pressure to say something new - just write about a thing you just figured out. And write about projects that you have done.
This advice is quite dangerous. For senior tech leaders disclosure of what they are working on often leads to disclosure of what a large part of company is working on. Even if company leaked information on what you are working on adding to it in your blog is not only about NDAs. Even if you own your company or startup and have a right to disclose you can cause damage. Even if your project is 'boring' disclosing information is potentially affecting company future outcomes.
Ofc one can have his own pet projects and only blog about them. But in the world where a cat tiktok account was allegedly used for spying there is no such thing as private tech blogs anymore.
At a couple of companies I've maintained an internal tech blog (e.g. using Confluence) so that I can write about internal projects in a private-to-the-company way.
Theres usually something there where the existing articles were out of date (because tech!) or maybe it took me multiple results to actually solve my own issue.
That might be a way for you to find things.
Also I write for myself, I'm basically documenting for my future self so I dont have to research the same thing again. Some of my tech posts are just 2 lines of shell script and brief description so I can search google for my own content later but these posts still seem to be useful to other people based on views.
I think this could work for any blog where you're just writing about your interests or hobbies!
"Me too." I have never had a blog but I feel this time it could be interesting to share what I do and discover. I'll treat each post as a "subject" that can be updated, this way I won't have any pressure to do everything perfectly when the blog entry is published. Good luck.
Maybe its just not worth it. Lots of people enjoy it, good for them. It doesn't mean everyone will enjoy it or benefit from it. Some people like skinny dipping in the middle of Winter - I dont do that either.
Just like you, I used to talk to myself in GitHub issues too. I stopped because my repos then were public and I thought it would be weird for people to see me do that when I eventually open sourced/brought on help. But after reading some of your posts and looking at your issues, I've started doing it again.
GitHub is a really amazing way to store information and it really didn't make sense to move discussions of those kinds elsewhere. The context gets easily lost when a lot of these 'self-discussion' was a simple one-liner like 'I found this bit on SO that refuted X'. I saw my thoughts evolve over several days as I uncovered new information and added it to the issue.
Being able to look back at things you wrote about 2, 5, 10 years ago is personally fascinating, but it's also a really good way of demonstrating how your skills and experience have grown over time.
Absolutely! One of my favorite things on my own website is the random button which takes me to a random page. It's a fun way to be teleported back in time to some post in the past.
Mine hit 20 last year: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Jun/12/twenty-years/