Why a blog

motivations and next steps

November 2023

Hi, this is the first entry of my blog.

Yes, not everything is centered yet, the colors may be off, I hope that it’s readable on mobile and I’m sorry if some things are not overall clean. (if you’re reading this in the future, this may not apply to you.)

But let’s put that aside for now and focus on why did I want to start a blog.

Motivations

I’ve always liked the idea of having my own blog. Something that’s mine where I can write about anything and do pretty much whatever I want.

As I was starting to tweet a little more, I read Your words are wasted from Scott Hanselman which made me consider that maybe I should stop procrastinating and that it was a good time to start moving. It was a reminder that as long as I only posted on other platforms, I was not owning any of my content. It could get deleted or lost, could be not easily searchable nor shareable. Now, for at least some of it, I’ll have some control of it.

With this as the basis of my motivations, I needed to make my own blog and did not want to just start publishing on another blogging platform.

The next trigger happenned very recently, two months after the first one, it was Why and how to write things on the Internet by Ben Kuhn, which also included a link to You should write blogs by Steve Yegge.

Theses two sources pushed me over by addressing some of the fears I had with blogging. The first one being that I don’t think I have that many interesting things to write about, but quoting Ben: “THE BAR IS LOWER THAN YOU THINK”.

The second one was that even if I did write something somewhat interesting, nobody would read it. For starters, if I don’t write anything, I’m sure that no one will ever read it. And Steve Yegge adds:

“practically nobody will read your blog. Unless it’s good. Even then, it’ll be a very long time before lots of people have read it. Don’t worry, though. If you put in the effort, and you write honestly, people will eventually find their way there.”

With this out of the way, I didn’t have any reasons not to write.

Next steps

So now that I have a blog, what do I hope to accomplish with it ? Plenty of things !

First, I will have to see if I manage to write regularly. I want to write about many subjects, but it should mainly be about tech, AI, board games and miniature painting.

Next, I would like to add some sections to this website:

Finally, I’d like to find a way to aggregate most of my content from other websites here. A way to keep a trace, an archive of what I write or like.

Few last words

So here it is, my blog. My ugly place on the internet. It just needs a domain and I’d almost be able to call it home, maybe next week ?

blogging