Why I’m Ready to Party Like It’s 1999…Again | The Internet Review
You can feel it in the air. What’s old is new again. Blogs are returning. RSS is again ascendant.
When I write a blog post, I want it to live on my blog, rather than a platform. I can thus invest my time thinking about how to make my blog better and backing it up, rather than having to worry about where my writing is, finding ways to export data from a platform, setting up persistent backups, etc.
You can feel it in the air. What’s old is new again. Blogs are returning. RSS is again ascendant.
Blogging isn’t one thing and that’s kind of the point. It exists fractured by intention and it can be many things to many people. And now, 20 years after the last blogging revolution, something like a fractured digital presence is once again appealing.
It me:
I’d do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules about structure or consistency of tone. A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved: I feel zero responsibility to “do my research” before pontificating. Purely for my own pleasure, I do often go deep. But it’s nearer the truth to say that some posts are outcomes of rambles across the archives of the internet, byproducts of the odd information trawled up and the lateral connections created.
I enjoyed reading this interview with Jim Nielsen, much as I enjoy reading Jim’s blog. He says:
The best part of blogging is what you discover and learn experientially along the way.
That chimes with what Matthias says in the first issue of his new newsletter:
On your personal site, getting it wrong is not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s a chance to start small, take first steps, learn, edit, and improve. It’s an invaluable opportunity to evolve and to grow.
This makes feel all warm and fuzzy:
At the time, I was disheartened by the tech industry and terrified of doing a tech post. I thought those things were for everyone else but me.
Only at the end of 2017 did something shift inside me, thanks to Jeremy Keith’s talk at the ViewSource conference. I discovered the IndieWeb community, and with that came the reassurance that my “nicheless” blog was absolutely okay.
Thanks to that feeling of acceptance, from 2018 onwards, my confidence really picked up, and I was blogging frequently, including web development things!
The web is what we make it.
Write for yourself.
Marginalia and annotations on the web.
Also, tipblogging.
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