First Post; or, Why?

In this post, I discuss why I created this blog, as well as the different options I considered for where to put it. Yes, after procrastinating as long as possible tweaking the CSS, it’s finally time to make my first post.

I won’t be talking about me much, however; instead there is the About Me page which I’ll be keeping updated.

Why write?

I’m sure there are myriad reasons for why people like to write (example), but here are mine. In fact, I’m so convinced that I’ll be embarking on a challenge to publish 100 blog posts in 365 days (100 Days To Offload); more on this in a future post.

Clearer thought

To me, writing is a part of understanding. The ability to clearly and concisely explain a concept to someone with as little concept as possible is proof that you have fully understood it. (This is an idea often attributed to Richard Feynman.) To me, my spoken words have always been kind of bumbling and stream-of-consciousness while my written words, with the power of editing, are eloquent by comparison. In my experience, writing forces the consolidation of thought. For a less intellectual example, journaling helps process, reframe, and label experiences, enough that it’s used quite a bit in cognitive-behavioral therapy.

While oral histories and the spoken word are older, the written word has a special status in the social domain. Indeed, according to The Information, literacy changes the way humans think about things, and not just the individuals that learned to read but the entire society. For example, a typical response from someone in a non-literate society when asked what a tree is would be “Just go outside and look at one”, versus one in a literate society, where the notion of what definitions are and why they’re important would be implicitly understood.^[1]

Learning the art

Much as any other skill, there is no better way to improving at the art of writing except by writing. That or maybe buying a book about writing and reading it instead of actually writing, not that I’d consider doing that. As for why, I want to be a good writer because there’s a certain pride in creating the finished product. I also really want more really good My Little Pony fanfictions to enter the world, ok?

Disturbingly, I’ve recently had more tip-of-the-tongue moments than I’m used to, which I really, really hope is just due to age or lack of practice and not some kind of brain damage.

External validation

Everyone who has a blog is putting oneself out there and at least has a distant hope that someone might read and appreciate their work. Otherwise, they’d just be writing a private journal in their word processor of choice (or, gasp, a physical journal). Writing in such a way to put oneself out there, there is always the possibility that I might become famous. I’ll settle for some updoots on Reddit or boosts/favorites on Mastodon though.

Another possibility is that someone, somewhere might derive some entertainment or useful information from my thoughts, which, needless to say, would be a great outcome too.

More realistically, I wonder if this blog is simply destined for obscurity. We can only wait and see.

Where to put the blog?

As you can see now, I’ve settled on creating my own website for my blog. Yet, the appeal of making the work of administering and paying for a website "somebody else’s problem"™ was not lost on me, and I thought quite a bit about this.

The Fediverse

I thought about hosting my blog somewhere on the Fediverse.

There’s Mastodon, but it is intended for microblogging. There is the 500-character limit on all posts, so I would be forced to chunk everything into threads. While this is really useful for enabling concise and fast-flowing conversation, the tooling is a pain for expressing longer, preplanned thoughts. Individual posts are rather ephemeral, and someone visiting my feed would be greeted with a giant list of all the posts I idly boost with no way to filter to my “proper” posts and no neat index of posts as would appear on a blog.

There are some Fediverse blogging offerings, but they have disadvantages. Plume is not under active development and doesn’t seem to be used very much. write.as has some very nice features like easy email newsletters, but these require payment. There are also the disadvantages of not managing the site myself, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Tumblr

Tumblr did seem to be an option. Offering my posts to a site with some kind of “The Algorithm™” would improve the discoverability of my blog. Unlike Mastodon, it can be used for proper long-form blogging, and even secretly offers an RSS feed for every blog. It also allows a much greater degree of control over theming than most non-self-hosted solutions. There is also a good deal of access to the MLP fan community, but little among hackers and software engineer types.

Fimfiction.net

Fimfiction.net actually does offer the ability to have a blog, though no RSS feed is generated, which would make it very difficult to follow if you’re not a frequent user of the site. I would only really use this if I wanted to exclusively write posts about My Little Pony fanfiction (reviews or updates on works in progress). It doesn’t seem like I’d get many eyeballs as only followers (of which I have barely any) who regularly check their feed can see it.

Bear

Bear (bearblog.dev) seems like a pretty solid minimalist blogging platform that a hacker might use. It supports custom domains. If I didn’t want to neurotically control every aspect of my site’s final appearance and functionality (and consequently have more time available for writing), it might have been a good choice for me.

Static website

It’s somewhat traditional, but I could host the blog as its own website with an RSS feed. Surprisingly, this option is actually free: there are at least a couple free static web hosts (amazing!) that support custom domains, such as GitHub Pages and GitLab Pages. GitLab Pages’ automatic SSL cert feature is awesome! Netlify is apparently a good paid option. Static webpages are just simple and resource-efficient. I already know/can learn my way around a static site generator, so the learning curve won’t be so hard for me. There is also the minor advantage of getting cred among hacker types for at least “operating” my own website.

I also have complete control of the data on the page, as well as the layout and formatting of my website. Arguably this is an anti-feature though, because I spent quite a long time tweaking the CSS on the site to my liking instead of writing anything! I am at least proud of how my site responsively reflows to suit different device and browser widths, and also the fact that there are zero accessibility warnings in Firefox’s accessibility inspector.

I also considered adding ActivityPub support to my blog somehow, but found that RSS is still the method of choice for, well, really simple syndication. Adding support is complicated; in fact, there is no way to do it without a server and database, and it is far more complex and resource-intensive than RSS.^[2] Thus, there’s no easy way to make pair a static website host with ActivityPub, yet, and it seems likely that future easy solutions will be paid thanks to the resource requirements. There is a plugin that makes this easy for WordPress, though. I will just have to settle with making a post on Mastodon whenever I publish a blog post, which can double as a comment section for it, and which I don’t have to moderate all by myself.

As for discoverability, it won’t be that great, but for each new blog post, I intend to post on Mastodon with a few hashtags, and maybe join a webring or two.

Another disadvantage is that if I die and stop paying my domain name provider for the domain, it will end up becoming a broken link. This might happen eventually to any of the other alternative services I mentioned, but at least it wouldn’t be because of me. At least, if that happens, it should still be archived by archive.org.

Conclusion

I think I should end this post before it expands too much. (This sounds like a skill that I’m sure I’ll get the hang of sometime.) I hope you enjoyed reading this meta-post. If my writing style or past works sound interesting, consider adding this site to your favorite RSS reader or following me on Mastodon.