Although Twitter has many positive features, it can be rightly criticised for being a self-indulgent, pointless, confusing, distorted popularity contest. The best thing about Twitter is that all of these criticisms used to apply to blogs. Thanks to Twitter, the idea of a blog now seems thoughtful, mature, literate, sophisticated, and nuanced. It seems like a good time to start a blog! But wait, I’ve had a blog for a very long time. And long before that I just put things on my web site.
Clearly there is something different going on. Thanks for all the fish, large search engine company, but I’ll be taking over my own blog publishing now. This may sound absurd but one of the problems with the previous incarnation was that I often had a hard time finding it. I would type "mixedxed" into a popular search engine (yes, the one hosting the thing!) and get nonsense. I see this isn’t such a problem today, but trust me, it was ridiculous and unnerving.
I tended to avoid using that blog for a couple of other reasons too. First I’m a bit skeptical about Google’s long term commitment to it. I have decided that my historical posts will be transferred. And second, transferred to where? To my computer empire. I just feel kind of weird using Blogger (or is it Blogspot, hmm) to essentially put things on the internet. Am I not a computer/internet expert? Shouldn’t putting something on the internet be trivial for me? Yes, yes it should. And it is. I have to agree with what this charming lesson on blogging says about blogging services.
"I’m sure that people have their reasons, but I cannot understand why anyone would ever write extended prose on Medium, Quora, or any other system that gobbles up your hard work and uses it for its own ends. Personally, I’m uncomfortable even going near a platform that ties my work to their database in any meaningful way.
On the other hand, Jekyll is just great. Your site is its own self-contained, completely customisable unit… The world won’t end if you use Tumblr or Wordpress or whatever, but it will be slightly worse."
That Jekyll thing sounds extremely sensible. So much so that I seem to have resynthesized its essential features from scratch. Putting a blog on the internet really has not been one of my more complicated programming challenges. In fact I did very little programming at all. The blogging system I have created basically uses a Python script to organize naming of posts, Asciidoc to convert to HTML, Bash to compose indices and RSS feeds, Rsync to make it live, and Make to do just what needs to be done when it needs to be done.
Now that I am in complete obsessive compulsive control of every aspect of publishing my blog, I find that I’m much more likely to write stuff. Using Vim to compose things on my centralized server is far more efficient and effective than, well, anything I can imagine.
The question still remains, why do this at all? Why share things with the internet? The first place to look for answers is my first post on the old blog. There I begin to answer the question "Whom is this blog for?" Far from being a way to encumber my friends with pointless ramblings they are actually uninterested in, this blog offers a way for them to opt out of longish emails from me filled with general musings.
As with my extremely helpful help pages having helpful documents on the internet allows me to access them anywhere (your phone, for instance). It also allows me to refer you to wisdom which I have already collected, organized, and preserved for just such occasions. For example if the topic of blogging comes up, I don’t need to recapitulate my thoughts about it, I can just refer to this.
Another potential audience is professional. Hopefully I’m not over-quoting the eloquent robertheaton.com, but he nicely corroborates my belief that…
"…a popular or populated blog is just another nice-to-have. I personally felt that having ~20 essays I could point to was a great way of demonstrating to someone that I’m at least a somewhat thoughtful person before even having met them. I pushed my blog hard in my CV and cover letter, and 15-20 interviewers made a comment along the lines of I liked your blog. I’m sure that some substantial percentage of these were just being polite (c.f. I like your haircut) but I’m equally sure that another substantial percentage actually had read it and enjoyed it."
This is a tough call actually. I’m painfully aware of the problems of markets with asymmetric information. By providing far more information than my competition, it is inevitable that some will perceive me as having more things they don’t like simply because I make more things known. On the other hand, it is my hope that an extraordinary level of transparency would be a very strong indication that I am not a secretly terrible engineer.
To conclude, let me be extremely clear. The main audience of this blog is me. I no longer have delusions of anyone caring about anything I say. Even when I’m very right and other people are very wrong, actually especially then, people generally don’t want to hear my opinions. But I do. I usually quite enjoy reading what I’ve written. Now it’s on the internet for you to decide for yourself.