About video only: Do you want to serve those types of people?!

I can ask: do you want to do that for people?

What the author posts is now different, but blogging is not dead.

A collection of thoughts about blogs and RSS

There are no rules to blogging except this one: always self-host your website because your URL, your own private domain, is the most valuable thing you can own.

About micro.blog

Each time I made a concerted effort to write and publish more, I started to move further away from what I wanted my blog to be. It has to be about me. It needs to revolve around my thoughts about topics and, more importantly, be about what I get up to.

You really shouldn’t care what people think. It’s the [place of residence on the web] I own and have control of

I’m not tied down by character limits. I don’t have comments and likes bootstrapped to my posts, begging to be utilized. [...] I feel a sense of peace of mind here

What are the characteristics of a blog?

• content is published in the form of posts, often in reverse chronological order
• content is posted on a website, online, with hypertext capabilities
• they are self-published, regardless of hosting platform, in that there is no gatekeeper authorizing publication

Blog posts do not have to be read in the order they were originally published.

Also as a distinct format, they are worthy of consideration, because the medium a message is served through is as important as the message itself.

Blogs are broad and can be defined by a lot of different examples. Technology enables it but does not solely define blogness. There are distinctions though

• composed of addressable, distinct posts
• order-irrelevant and non-hierarchical
• impermanent and ever-evolving
• self and external-referencing
• it is published online to an unknown audience
• multiple types of content (image, video, text, sound, ...)

In contrast, newsletters miss the searchability. They are not addressable and lack of public publishing. The publisher can know the audience.
Social media serves a mixed feed with posts by other authors. The algorithm incentivizes the work creator's post. The platforms reinforce a strong bias to the present.

It seems "blogs argument themselves". They are "contemplation on a particular theme in depth".

What is the future of the blog medium? It's still a new medium and it depends on how we want it to mature in the next 20 years.

I think most people would be better served by subscribing to small b blogging. What you want is something with YOUR personality. Writing and ideas that are addressable (i.e. you can find and link to them easily in the future) and archived (i.e. you have a list of things you’ve written all in one place rather than spread across publications and URLs) and memorable (i.e. has your own design, logo or style).

A blog post is not the same as an essay or article. It’s simply an update to the log of information you’re writing on your website. That stream of posts, together, makes up your blog. So a post can be as short or as long as you like It’s your voice, so they can also be as formal or informal as you like. I use a pretty informal voice in my blogging because that’s what comes naturally to me.

They list different blogging platform:

• https://bearblog.dev/
• https://write.as/
• https://neocities.org/
• https://ghost.org/
• https://micro.blog/
• https://home.omg.lol/

And more!

What I’ve found is this–after people get to posting #200 or beyond, they uniformly report that they’re glad they did it.

A blog service

Before the social media craze or publishing platforms, and long before ‘content creator’ was a job title, blogs served as one of the primary forms of online expression and communication. [...] We had webrings, forums, and carefully curated link pages instead.

At their core, they all have one characteristic in common: they’re there because their owners wanted to carve out their space on the internet. And I think you should do the same. Let’s talk about why that is.

1. Platforms aren’t forever homes
2. SEO Writing is dead, storytelling is back
3. Communities > Followers

Idea of writing:

• Here’s a cool thing I made.
• Here’s a cool thing someone else made.
• Here’s something I just learned.
• Here’s something I want to learn that looks cool.
• Why I want to learn/use/do this thing.
• Why I don’t want to learn/use/do the thing.
• I’m in the process of learning something but I haven’t quite got it figured out yet.
• Here’s something else I discovered while learning a thing.
• Let’s learn a thing together!
• Here’s a tip, tool and/or person that helped me recently. Maybe it’ll help you too.
• Here’s a problem that’s been bugging me.
• This is what I think about work/life/the industry/the world/this UI component right now.
• Here’s an interesting thing someone else has to say. Here’s my take on it.
• I’m feeling motivated! This is what’s motivating me.
• I’m feeling unmotivated or burnt out. Here’s why.
• This is what I’ve been reading/watching/listening to recently.
• Here’s a list of things I could blog about.

1. It's perfectly fine to blog just for fun.
2. Start out on a premade platform.
3. If you decide to own your own platform, keep it boring.
4. Use semantic markup.
5. It's totally okay not to have a cadence.
6. You'll be amazed what some people don't know yet.
7. Sometimes, 80% > 100%
8. It's okay to ignore some feedback.

I found that the cyclical nature and the pressure to write anything was burning me out.

Yeah, I have that too. That and the thing is I also didn't want to write 3 phrases, so I have never-ending articles that I never publish 😞

You completely give up control of your traffic to search engines and social platforms. Along with email newsletters, RSS is among the few options remaining to bloggers for establishing a direct communication channel and relationship with readers. With no gatekeepers.

The two arguments against do not stand:

• ads can be enforced by providing a snippet of the post. The reader then needs to navigate to the blog post URL
• web scraping is not that much harder on a blog too