{"id":1539,"date":"2025-03-16T21:34:57","date_gmt":"2025-03-16T21:34:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/?p=1539"},"modified":"2025-03-16T21:40:43","modified_gmt":"2025-03-16T21:40:43","slug":"why-blogging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/?p=1539","title":{"rendered":"Why blogging?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dave Winer asks that bloggers respond<\/a> to his post on The Writers' Web.<\/a>\u00a0 In re-reading it, the tenet that resonates most with me is "Open, for real".\u00a0 One of the reasons I've been blogging so long is for the reasons he describes there: using small components loosely joined that can be replaced as appropriate, and formats that are long-lived because they're simple, to maintain something that I use for most of my adult life.<\/p>\n

'Course, I'm a software guy, so I was forced to come to that realization over time in my professional life.\u00a0 It took me a few years to understand the tradeoff between the simplicity of an all-in-one tool and the flexibility of a set of small interconnected tools, and get off the Microsoft bandwagon where the tradeoff for making everything relatively simple was to lock me into a non-standard development process that was driven ever faster by the thousands of developers they had in-house.\u00a0 I remember realizing that I was having to charge people to replace perfectly functional software after a few years with rewrites because the underlying MS-based toolset had been discontinued and I couldn't just replace or extend any small part.\u00a0 The solution was to move to the open-source environment: Linux, gcc, simple text tools like wiki, blog, markdown, HTML, ANSI SQL, PNG.\u00a0 Self-hosting collaborative tools, so they couldn't be altered or removed.\u00a0 Paths to migrate any data from one simple format to another, should it be required.<\/p>\n

For the same reason, I host a blog server on a generic hosting service and post my thoughts there.\u00a0 I have no interest in being widely read, nor do I want to find all this text removed or edited because whatever service I had mistakenly chosen to use as a publisher decided not to let it remain.\u00a0 I think most of the non-technical people I know choose to use the all-in-one product because of the low bar to entry, and I applaud Dave for trying to replicate that with his Tech for Poets series, but it's still harder to use collections of tools together than one big tool, built by a big company that has to see a return.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, I see WordLand as a great addition to this collection of small tools.\u00a0 I've used WordPress because I can self-host it, it requires a minimal amount of maintenance and it used to have a low overhead for posting new stuff.\u00a0 But at some point the ambitions grew, and it evolved from the straightforward journalling system it had been into a Content Management System and simply pushing content onto my blog became onerous.\u00a0 So I didn't post as much.\u00a0 Now, with WordLand, it's simple again, and as a result I'm posting many more items.<\/p>\n

I keep a blog mostly to note down thoughts and links to which I'd like to return and which I occasionally want to share.\u00a0 Not every writing system is for publication.\u00a0 Not every system is for serving advertising, nor for engaging in tit-for-tat argument.\u00a0 Sometimes you want to just dash off a thought, sometimes you want to write an essay.\u00a0 It's a web, not a monoculture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dave Winer asks that bloggers respond to his post on The Writers' Web.\u00a0 In re-reading it, the tenet that resonates most with me is "Open, for real".\u00a0 One of the reasons I've been blogging so long is for the reasons he describes there: using small components loosely joined that can be replaced as appropriate, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1539"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1541,"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539\/revisions\/1541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}