Reblogging

¡ 2 minute read

How Midjourney envisions this post being written. I asked for visible writing on screen, and, well, yep 🤦‍♂️

For the third straight year, it was New Year’s Eve and I hadn’t written anything all year. I only had a few hours left to change that, just like last year and the year before that.

But did I really need to? I didn’t. I enjoyed the holiday with my family and made peace with this site not having anything from 2022, the first year without a post since it was launched1.

How did I get to this point? When did blogging turn from an outlet to an obligation?

As you can see, I used to write a decent amount and simply don’t anymore. Two contributing factors are that I haven’t kept up with the topic I used to primarily cover (iOS development), and I got older and busier2.

But more than either, I think the bigger reason is that rather than trying to expand my thoughts beyond 280 characters, I became content just tweeting something out and being done with it. Any medium-sized thought was either compressed into a tweet or, increasingly infrequently, expanded into an essay.

This wasn’t always the case! Here‘s a short post that I’m glad wasn’t a tweet, though almost certainly would have been in recent years. Here’s another.

While the bar for tweeting couldn’t be lower, the bar for publishing here felt like it had grown to be insurmountable. If you’re only going to publish once a year, it had better be good, right3?

No more. This is my space on the Internet and I can change it however I want such that I’ll actually start to use it again. And I will4.

While my inability to blog clearly isn’t a recent phenomenon, Twitter’s current managerial situation has unsurprisingly prompted a lot of my recent reflections on the topic. As articulated well in Bring back personal blogging:

The biggest reason personal blogs need to make a comeback is a simple one: we should all be in control of our own platforms.

If what is happening on Twitter hasn’t demonstrated it, our relationship with these social media platforms is tenuous at best. The thing we are using to build our popularity today could very well be destroyed and disappear from the internet tomorrow, and then what?

Owning your content and controlling your platform is essential, and having a personal blog is a great way to do that.

So here I am. It’ll be pretty embarassing if this is still my latest post a year from now.

  1. Funnily, I likely wouldn’t have ever cared if the design of my Writing page didn’t group posts by year. I could have just changed the design… ↩

  2. I have two kids now! ↩

  3. I felt like my one post from 2020 actually was. Last year’s, less so. ↩

  4. I’ve always liked how M.G. Siegler keeps different blogs for different purposes: 500ish for posts almost exactly like this one, 5ish for links, etc. He’s a prolific writer and I have to imagine that the different framings serve as somewhat of a mental lubricant. While I only plan to write here, there are tweaks I can and probably should make: renaming “writing” to “blog,” allowing myself to post without including a header image, etc. ↩