Why I still blog after 15 years

> "I keep this blog for me to write, not necessarily for others to read."

This is now to me the "old school" internet creator attitude (that I still possess). I don't blog as much any more but do create content elsewhere - a lot of it is for my own enjoyment and creative outlet, to blow off steam, whatever - the fact that other people may want to watch it is secondary. I do try to do things people want, but only if I want to do it.

The only reason I highlight this is that the up and coming generations absolutely do not see content creation in the same way. I got in an absurd argument with an early 20 something on a social media platform about how annoying ads were that were disguised as content. The response was overwhelmingly "Well, how else do you expect content creators to make a living?"

I do not disagree that creators should be able to monetize their content however they please, but the fact that people see that as the end and only goal of content creation is baffling to me and almost certainly making it worse. This same person tried to tell me it's been the same way since the earliest days of youtube - which they would have been in diapers around that time - is absolutely not true. The idea of content creation as a full time career is relatively new, and I hate it. The worst part is if you don't participate in the type of obnoxious engagement hacking or buried ads that these "professional" creators do, the algorithms punish you for it.

I've kept a blog for almost 20 years now.

I think author missed #8: I've personally benefited so much from the writings shared by others that it feels amiss to not share back things I've learned and little tips and tricks. One of my most viewed blog posts is a really short and simple one on simulating drag-and-drop of files with Playwright automation. I found no such information when I ran into this problem so the only logical thing to do was to share it for the next person that ran into this issue.

I always encourage devs I mentor to write more and to share what they learn. For all of the reasons that the author listed, but also because it's a mechanism to give back to the community that all of us rely on whether we're writing code, making a recipe, doing a craft, learning a new hobby, etc.

A lot of younger devs tell me "why would anyone want to read my writing" and I show them YouTube and how many different videos there are on how to make a pancake (and more are added every day!). There's a different audience for every voice and someone out there is looking for your voice. Everyone should make a habit to write in long form.

Interesting points, and it's wonderful that we can use blogs for other purposes and that they can evolve over time.

I think people get hung up on the tech stack of a blog, so while I appreciate the timeline, I think we put too much emphasis on that in general..

Personally; have one sole purpose for my blog: to turn the arguments you conclude in the shower into something productive.

It's somewhat cathartic to write down in as many words as you want to, with as much time as you want to: the actual underpinning arguments of a stance you hold, with citations and alternative opinions considered.

Writing a comment on HN is nice, but largely there's a time pressure, wait a day for a good response and the conversation has concluded... or, make it too long and you lose your audience.

A blog post allows you time to reflect, not be reactive, and to truly get your point across, and people are more likely to read it.

"I keep this blog for me to write, not necessarily for others to read."

This is the key to do anything over a long period of time but certainly applies to blogging. Nothing is better than intrinsic motivation and something you do for yourself. I have a blog that I try to keep up with. I fail to be consistent and one reason always has been me asking "Who should I write it for" instead of "What do I want to write about for myself". Something to take away here.

Nice presentation and nice recap!

A couple of observations from the text that resonate with me:

* "Blogging helps me become a better writer, which in turns helps me become a better developer." Yes. Writing is super-important as a developer, particularly in a corporate setting, because communicating ideas clearly is critical in convincing others and in showing your contributions. And to be a better writer, well, one has to write more and blogging helps with that!

* "The posts have grown larger and more ambitious." I've noticed a similar change in my own blog, where posts have grown from frequent 300-word long posts to infrequent 3000-word long posts. Other platforms like Twitter have captured the space of short form writing and, more "importantly", consuming such content.

In any case, my own recap at the 20-year mark from 3 months ago is here: https://jmmv.dev/2024/06/20-years-of-blogging.html ;-)

I have had a blog since 2001 (wow! about to hit 25 years soon), while many of my peers have dropped off. Remember, this was the time when Wikipedia started. I’ve neglected it and have not taken care of it as much as I used to 10+ years ago. I did away with analytics about 5 years ago. WP-Engine grandfathered me while I was on WordPress, but I gave that up, too.

Now, I write for myself, mostly to remember things that I can re-read later. And to have a URL on the web that I can give out with answers to topics that I have to answer repeatedly. I write plain text without any front-matter, or tags, as simple as it gets that GitHub Pages can spit out. If the basic CloudFlare analytics is to be believed, it continuous to be pretty well visited.

But I like tinkering with it, and there are many unfinished articles. I think I will keep it for as long as I can. https://brajeshwar.com

> I worry that if I add statistics to the blog it’ll change from an activity I perform for the activity’s sake, to an exercise in hunting clicks where I write for others instead of for myself.

If I ever finally find the motivation to start a blog, I think this is a key point. Vanity metrics would be demotivating.

If your blog provider supports it, adding a “Open a Random Post” button on your blog makes the experience much more fulfilling in the long term, as you (and others) can revisit different posts from different eras. Websites don’t have physical form that readers can navigate, so we can take advantage of that by adding serendipity manually.

Coincidentally, I noticed my blog’s first post¹ is from September 24, 2009, so yesterday it became exactly 15 years old.

I have taken great care to preserve all of the posts on my personal website, but unfortunately I don’t write new posts very often lately. I wonder if that’ll change.

[1]: https://dmitri.shuralyov.com/blog/1

This resonates with me. I had a recent stint of not writing due to very intense discouragement and feeling like a bit of a fraud. Like Jonas, I was writing for myself and kind of lived in a bubble where my posts had no comment system and I saw around 5 visitors per day on average with the odd boom to hundreds to thousands for a day or two. This was rare. I didn't worry much about what I wrote so much as how much I enjoyed writing it.

Eventually I was struggling in the job market and someone suggested that my writing was hurting my prospects. They found the odd typo and grammar mistake, thought the content wasn't particularly good, that it was hard to follow/disjointed, etc.

I immediately took it all down and felt like a bit of a fool to have thought anyone would actually find it useful. Maybe I should have written it but kept it offline like a personal journal, I thought.

After a year or so it occurred to me how incredibly wrong all of that was. I never should have taken anything offline. I've hired people before, many times, and not once did I stumble across a candidate's personal blog and think "ugh, typos. grammar mistakes. no thanks". These things are a signal of a person's character, curiosity, ability, and all kinds of other factors that matter a lot. Almost always these things helped people I was hiring more than it hurt. There's the odd case where I could tell the site wasn't followed through on and that's not great, but it's very relatable too.

I took a while but started writing again, started sharing it in an attempt to shake the self-doubt out of myself, and it has been an incredibly refreshing and rejuvenating experience. Writing reminds me of what I love about programming, because I primarily write about the things I find fascinating or engaging. It gives me a greater sense of knowledge and ability as I've covered a topic so thoroughly. It's a mental exercise not only in writing itself, but understanding.

Jonas says this and I couldn't agree more: something about it is just fun. I can't put my finger on it. When I'm writing, I'm in a focused and engaged state almost instantly. It's where I want to be.

If you doubt yourself and feel like writing isn't for you—even though you enjoy it—I hope you can take something from my experience and realize that it's still worth it. No one cares if you don't write like an acclaimed author. No one cares if there's the odd typo or bad grammar. The point is to enjoy it, and share that with people who are curious. The more you do it, the better you'll get. It can become a real source of joy in your life.

I share many of the author's reasons for having a small and non-committal blog. I also think that one of the overriding reasons I have a blog is that I spend a lot of my waking hours reading (it's how I access and understand the world). Therefore, it only feels natural to want to write a text and become part of this writing (and reading) club.

So glad to hear that there are other folks out there who continue to blog over long periods of time. It has the potential to create such an incredible resource, for the general public, for history, and for — of course — the writers themselves.

I've written on various blogs, including my own, since the late 90s, but I have been blogging consistently on a single instance for a little over 17 years. I've seen my writing shift from long form to rapid fire and back again.

I've also noticed that it's become mostly formulaic, as a way of dispersing information to folks. But it's those rare occasions where I'm actually struck with the inspiration to write a longer form thought piece that really brings me back to the whole reason I started my current blog.

Again, super happy to read this piece and the comments here. I'll remain hopeful that it inspires others to start — or to return to — blogging. It's really an incredible means of communicating with one another.

I have no idea who this person is, but I loved reading this article. The author is clearly a better writer than me and managed cleanly assemble the reasons most of us do this.

I also run a blog and have since 1997. Didn't start seriously contributing until 2008 or so. It's a labor of love and I do it for many of the reasons stated here. Love to write, love to push myself to make things more "usable" for folks other than me. And it helps me check myself on certain topics (do I understand this enough to teach it to someone else?)

I have been hassled by some younger folks who say "blogging is dead" (can't argue with that) and it's a waste of time because it will never make me viral, rich, or famous (I knew that before I started). But I do it for me, and I still recommend other people do it as well. It's good for the soul.

With all the AI generated content, we will be having AI models using AI generated text on the internet. Blogs from people who are hopefully not using AI to generate text might be the only valid source of truth in a near future

Absolutely loved this.

Things I love about your blog:

- The fact that every post has links to the sourcecode!

- Open source

- No ads, no trackers, no popups

- I can tell you use this all the time. So I know you strive to make your content as good as possible _for you_. Which is a strong signal that it will also be good _for me_.

- I love the timeline (but wish they were done in a way that reflects scale, see user test video for more)

Here's my user test: https://news.pub/?try=https://www.youtube.com/embed/UF7fjvE_...

I love my blog. I post like maybe 4 times a year when I feel suitably inspired.

I find HN far and away the most random aggregator. Reddit is very reliable for me. When I share my posts on HN they almost never get traction. But then they randomly do months later when someone shares the same post! Kind of annoying.

My blog is artisanal handcrafted HTML and CSS. I honestly find it much easier and simpler than generators.

I currently host on Cloudflare for free. I was previously on Netlify.

https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/

Writing, updating and saving your progress in several drafts is the only place where you write for yourself, but as soon as you publish them online it automatically becomes for everyone using the internet. And

> I keep this blog for me to write, not necessarily for others to read

is the exact opposite mindset sentence (or whatever people want to call it) of what I wrote in my Medium account bio, which is "I write for myself so that everyone can read it."

Here is the link -> https://medium.com/@shahzaib

Your trajectory is quite similar to mine, particularly working with Kohana and Jekyll over the years.

My blog, in its current iteration, has also recently turned 15 (first post on June 27th, 2009). Reflecting on this long journey and how it has helped my career, I've decided to write a book about the experience.

If you'll excuse a bit of self-promotion, those interested can find out more at https://codertocto.com.

I hope sharing my journey might be helpful to others on a similar path.

> The Game Engine Trap.

What is that? I have a few theories.

One is that the developer doesn't really want to ultimately write a game.

Creating the assets needed for a game, as an example, can be daunting. Implementing high scores, audio, saving game state.... There is a lot of work to create a game beyond the rendering part.

Or the developer is intimidated by the more qualitative nature of the "game part" of the game. The engine can be measured in FPS, etc. How do you measure how fun the game is?

A recent approach I took was to write the game "firstmost" — the game engine was a necessity to realizing that goal. FWIW, I used SDL to create a kind of sprite engine. The "engine" was bare-bones but allowed me to recreate a shareware game of mine for Steam.

After the project was done I began a second (sprite-based) game by first moving over the same game engine code. But this new project required I extend the engine (there were new "feature requirements" unique to this new game).

In this way the engine can evolve from project to project, but never becomes a means to no end.

(And if you do it right, you ought to be able to pull the engine back into the original project with a minimal of refactoring.)

Maybe I'm just suggesting something that everyone already knows.

I appreciate the author's reflection on blogging for 15 years, but I didn't fully connect with the vibe. I've been maintaining several blogs (both personal and business) for years, and even had a personal webpage that shared personal content before the 2000s. It reminds me of artists like Edgar Allan Poe, who, despite their struggles, couldn't stop writing. When it's in your nature, there's no 'off switch' no matter the circumstances.

I started my blog when I went to college in the late nineties, and if I don't count the few years after grad school when I stopped altogether, it's been updated fairly consistently this whole time. It's changed a lot: I used to write full articles and short stories every week, but now that is rare (though it still happens: I just did one a few days go). It's evolved into being mostly a commonplace book now.

What's more, all search engines are disallowed, and there are no comments, so it's just for me and a few people who know about it. Design-wise, it's just a single file with minimal HTML, and thousands of entries, sorted by time. You can search it with cmd-f, or have the page scroll to a random entry. It loads in about a second. There are at least two ways it gives me value: in having an archive of 25+ years of things I thought were important, and giving me a reason to keep my eyes open for things to think and post about.

I think that's an unusual reason to have a blog, but I also think the people who started blogs to make money or get hired are probably out of the game by now, too.

I guess I've been blogging on https://blog.jgc.org/ for 19 years now. I don't know where the time went. I keep doing it because I have new stuff to write about (from time to time). I suppose I'll keep doing it until I don't (have new stuff to write about).

Something that gives me pause (to actually write into a blog) or to put up any toy projects / exploratory code as FOSS is I am not too keen on the idea of LLM companies and similar scraping that for their dataset [1].

Its not really a new problem, scraping the web and similar for monetary profit has been a thing for decades, but it feels worse in some ways? At least I certainly have paused and had more of a reluctance to making minor things available with no strings attached than I historically have been.

Same goes for writing into sites like HN or Reddit really.

Perhaps that is being selfish, after all there is some value in documenting things for other humans to find out about, maybe time-capsule of a blog is a better fit for this? Although blogging about anything particularly niche / context heavy is likely irrelevant a few years on.

EDIT:

[1] As in not help them even in a minuscule way, anymore than has already been done with them buying / scraping any public content already written.

"I keep this blog for me to write, not necessarily for others to read."

That's me. I started in 2006, except I just post photos.

A lot of interesting discussions.

I personally hope the internet and it's archives stick around for a long time. I wonder whether the future will be interested in the past. Who among us might live in obscurity today, only to be a star in 2424?

In this age of metrics and analytics, it's easy to get caught up in chasing views. But writing for yourself rather than for clicks seems like a much more sustainable long-term approach.

I really enjoyed that post graph of theirs. I've shied away from battling with plain CSS over the years. I think it's a good time to finally lean into this weakness of mine.

I am trying to get myself into doing it regularly.

One of my main thoughts was documenting things I have found I had to do to with certain projects to get it the way I want, like homebrew packages I need to install and what to setup for if and when I wipe my computer and start fresh or get a new computer and want to set it up like I am used to.

I have had many times I forget little things I had to do and end up going through the whole spiel of getting it to work correctly.

I've been blogging since 2003. I still blog because it clarifies my thoughts, lets me show off my knowledge, and occasionally even helps people.

"I keep this blog for me to write, not necessarily for others to read" he says, in an article written entirely for other viewers.

I haven't a clue how Seth Godin manages to write one blog post every single day, of every month, of every year.

Maybe blog posts should be a little lower effort, like tweets.

Hi OP, the typeface on your site is one of the most aesthetically pleasing I’ve encountered. Would you be open to sharing its name?

I miss myself and my urge to write when I was thrilled by the concept in 2002.

My original blog would be old enough to commit cr-- drive now.

Can you share the theme you are using ? I want to check if it can be deployed on github pages. Thanks.

> 15 years is a long time; longer than I’ve been waiting for Winds of Winter

don't do that to me

blogging is such a nice way to sharpen thinking skills. I love doing it.

>Time flies when you’re having fun

I know it's a cliché but it's very true

It's called "newsletter" now.

My personal blog is over 23 years old now. I am sure I wouldn't do it this long for anybody but myself. I haven't checked the readership figures for years, though I know some people read it, because they comment. I think it's nice, though I think if nobody read it at all, I'd still be doing it.

If you have stopped blogging, been meaning to get back on it, or simply want to start, but been put off by the popular platform options, I'm working on a blogging platform myself that sheds the crummy modern bits of the web: https://lmno.lol. Here's my own blog https://lmno.lol/alvaro (about 10 years worth of posts). You can read the blogs on your phone, your desktop, your terminal. No JS needed.

Coincidentally the platform hits nearly all of the wished items in this recent lobste.rs post https://lobste.rs/s/d1n9k6/kind_websites_i_like

You can drag and drop your entire blog from a markdown file https://indieweb.social/@xenodium/112265481282475542 User your favorite text editor to write.

No need to sign up or log in to try it out. You can edit ephemeral blogs.

I haven't officially launched, but if you'd like to get blogging, I'll be happy to share an invite code to get you started now. Ping help AT lmno.lol.

I just started blogging again regularly after 15 years of neglect. It feels like it's too late. While I do see traffic from Google, I often wonder if it's just not worth the effort. I will probably use it more like a journal, than any sort of commercial side hustle. I do enjoy writing with more of my personal style, knowing it will contrast against the AI drivel.

Live journal anyone ?

Nobody cares why you are still blogging