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The Anti Blog.

I have had some time recently and I’ve been trying to zhuzh up the tech stack a bit.

When I was doing this spring cleaning, I started wondering about whether I should make a blog. These days, everyone and their dog has one. But… why?

That question led me on to four more consecutive questions:

What is a blog?

Blogs or weblogs started out as websites that were a log of events published online. These days they’ve transformed into lists of published articles in the form of guides, updates, informational posts, and more. Often blogs contain a mix of all these different types of article.

What is a blog for?

I think there are roughly three kinds of blog which have distinct purposes:

True weblogs are blogs that are just reporting on the latest updates of someone’s life or a project. These have a very clear purpose: to keep people informed.

Personal blogs often contain informative articles that are not just updates. I imagine there are a couple reasons behind why people write them. I presume the main reason is that people have interesting insights or knowledge and they want to share that with others. Their blog serves as a convenient place to put these articles.

Company blogs are often similar to personal blogs, but are almost always done as a marketing exercise. This is not always a bad thing - there are a lot of high quality blogs. At work we put a lot of effort into the GitButler blog, but at the end of the day, it is a marketing outlet.

What are you trying to convey in a blog?

For the personal blogger, they are trying to inspire and teach others. For my website, I’d like to share things I find interesting - whether that’s technical insights, design patterns, or just interesting problems I’ve encountered. This puts me squarely in the personal blog camp.

Is it the best way to convey that?

I… don’t… think so. At least not for me. There are a few aspects of traditional blogs that don’t quite align with how I want to share ideas:

First, I don’t think that a long list is the best way to explore or find things. Tags can be applied and posts can be put into different feeds, but I don’t think that is quite the same as having a more curated tree you can explore.

Further, I’d like to be “able to” change my articles in the future. Sure, there is nothing stopping you from retroactively changing your blog, but anything more than a minor correction feels a little strange.

However - to make the case for blogs. If someone found what I write interesting enough, they might want some way of seeing what comes next. Blogs do are often structured in a way that makes it easy to find what is new.

What does this mean for me?

I have currently decided to do the following: Have a website, and an RSS feed which contains updates about the website. That might be “I’ve updated an article” or “I’ve done something new”.