Reverse Engineer. Blogger.
Follow: @c2dev2, RSS, JSON, Micro.blog.
👉 Aaron Parecki:
what if instead of webring we called it blogchain
Go ahead and read Matt Haughey’s post on why he left Twitter. But I wanted to pull out this bit:
I didn’t like that everything I wrote ended up being hard to find or reference, and even hard for me to pull up myself when I wanted, where a blog makes it pretty dang easy to see everything you wrote about in the past.
If I’m analyzing my reasons for blogging and/or microblogging on my own domain this is likely #1. I love having a history of my thoughts, guesses, observations, and photos. And I love that I own it.
A little over a year ago we started rolling out Micro.blog to Kickstarter backers. So much has happened since then — from new Micro.blog platform features to companion apps like Sunlit and Wavelength — that I wanted to highlight a few milestones.
See also, my interview with Manton earlier this year. So much has happened since that interview was published. Micro.blog has been fun to watch grow.
My only complaint, now that I’ve switched to Android, is that M.b leaves Android users out to dry since all of the clients Manton has released are for iOS only. However, I believe that will change this year as more tools are released for M.b that are cross platform. At least I hope so.
A hearty congratulations to the Micro.blog team on this anniversary. Many more to come.
I’ve recently made three small updates to my site.
I suppose the first one isn’t so small. I’ve changed web hosts. Last week I migrated this site from WP Engine (which was getting very costly) to Dreamhost (which, so far, has under performed).
Moving the site was rather painless. However, the performance of Dreamhost’s shared services is very poor. I don’t even know why they offer it. My blog does not receive very high traffic but I get warnings nearly every day about there being performance issues related to my site. I would think that WordPress, out-of-the-box with very little in the way of plugins, for a personal web site would be easy to host. A slam dunk. I guess not.
So, at my next opportunity I’ll be looking to move hosts once again (though I did pay for an entire year). Recommendations welcome. I figure $100-200 a year is plenty for a personal blog.
Second, I’ve removed the ads I had on my site. You may not have even noticed them. That is because I only showed ads on posts that were older than 7 days old. I did this for a few months as an experiment. The ads made money but I hated seeing them on my site. The experiment was to see whether or not I could tolerate having them for the few dollars they’d generate. The answer is no.
Third, recently I’ve begun posting groups of images to my site. The reason I’ve started doing this is to remove some friction in my photo publishing process. I used to post single images per post and so trips or photoshoot days were spread out over many posts. Now, though, I’m wrapping all of those images into single posts, like this one. I find this much easier and so I’ll likely do it more often.
The problem then became that on my images page there was no way to tell which posts had single images or which had multiple. I’ve now added a small visual cue to show how many images are on that post. I like the way it turned out.
Decades in and my personal site continues to be one of my very favorite projects.
Dan Moore on how blogging every day for 100 days lessened the pressure of publishing:
But once I committed to writing once a day, I was focused on getting something out. I still wanted to be proud of it, but there wasn’t as much pressure. It could even be something really short, or just a pointer to a different piece that I thought was interesting (like here or here).
So many of my colleagues and friends over the years have found it difficult to blog. They feel such pressure to make something they thought was “perfect”. Daily blogging is freeing. Getting ideas out into the world would never happen if everyone waited until they were perfect.
History belongs to those willing to hit publish.
Of course, this reminds me of so many pieces written over the years. Like this 2017 piece from Manton Reece No-pressure blogging (see also). It also reminds me of my friend Gary Vaynerchuk’s advice to budding entrepreneurs and, most recently, hip-hop artists to get a new song out every single day.
The message is the same. Publishing every day is freeing and leads to results you may never have imagined. It has for me.
I realized that I want my blog to be me on the web. This used to be true, but then along came Twitter, and then my presence got split up between two places.
Welcome back to using one spot to blog and microblog Brent.
I find myself in the same dilemma with Instagram lately. I publish photos there first and sometimes post them here. That will change starting this week. I’m going to try to share photos on my blog first and then maybe go to Instagram. Enough monkeying around!
Also, quite frankly, Twitter turned into a cesspool almost overnight. My friend Alan Jacobs was very vocal about his split from Twitter, and after reading his vibrant blog and new book, How To Think, I just decided to give daily blogging a go again, and this time, to do it on my URL, on my old-school WordPress blog, like the old days, when blogging actually meant something to me.
Also
With blogging, I’m not so sure it’s about quantity as much as it’s about frequency: for me, there’s something kind of magical about posting once a day. Good things happen. Something small every dayleads to something big. (Seth Godin has championed daily bloggingfor years—he just passed his 7000th post.)
/via Jeremy Keith