What do you blog about?

[Dan Q]

If I may quote Manuel Moreale:

Blogging: you’re doing it right

That’s all you need to know. If you’re doing it, you’re doing it right. If you have decided to reclaim ownership of your place on the web, you’re doing it right. It doesn’t matter how you did it. It doesn’t matter if you’re self-hosting or using a SAAS. It doesn’t matter if your content lives on a database or in a TXT file. It doesn’t matter if you did everything yourself or you paid someone to do it for you. It doesn’t matter if you post once a day or once a year. What matters is that you’re doing it. Your effort is commendable. You deserve to be thanked so, thank you.

That's the single most important thing to know about blogging, in my opinion. You have permission to write stuff. Don't overthink the "how" and "why" and "what".

Personally: I write about... just about anything. My blog ends up pretty much all over the place. This year I've managed to blog every single day (I set out to blog on every one of the first hundred as a particularly hardcore twist on the #100DaysToOffload challenge but I've kept going since) and a lot of it has been about my experience of getting my house flooded, having to move, etc.. But outside of that and other "personal life" stuff, this year so far I've been blogging about the limits of the preservation of old videogames, cheating at puzzle games, random silly things I hate, weird games, how to run your own VPN provider, the weirdness of "achievements" systems on pornographic websites, learning to be a hacker, nostalgia, music, and computers, roomscale VR with a HTC Vive (which still rocks, ten years on), getting my birth certificate retroactively corrected with my current name, the :has and :not CSS operators, among other things.

Oh, and I also blogged about answering somebody's question about my "process" for blogging... which turns out to boil down to: when you think of something, start a draft; revisit your drafts often; eventually, publish.

[snufkin]

This thread has been really enlightening. Please excuse me if this is off-topic. I don't blog these days — when I first moved to a foreign country, I blogged to document daily things, log recipes, or discuss my thoughts on cultural features like makeup. But I found myself drawing inward somewhat, preferring to keep a physical journal rather than blog publicly. Regrettably, I don't really read blogs. I've read very good blog posts and subscribed to that person's RSS feed, but I never manage to keep up or stay interested. If I can't get/stay interested in some acclaimed blog, how could my words be of value to anyone? It got to a point that I'd try writing something in a notebook instead and find that that act was enough, that I didn't feel the need to share it online. That led me to wonder, why blog?

So I suppose I'm curious *why* we blog? Everyone here has different reasons and topics and posting frequencies. Why are we blogging in public, the digital commons rather than in a notebook for ourselves, or even on a semi-closed platform like Substack?