2025-01-25 Why Blog?
====================

I've been asking myself this every now and then. I'm not a party
person and while I've learned to do small talk, I don't talk as much
as I write, I think. Recently, @[email protected] blogged about the Blog
Question Challenge. It reminded me of similar posts of mine.
2024-03-07 Why do we even blog?. 2010-08-05 Why Blog. I keep
wondering.

The Blog Question Challenge asks the following questions:

* Why did you start blogging in the first place?

* What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use
 it?

* Have you blogged on other platforms before?

* What’s your favourite post on your blog?

* Any future plans for the blog?

I think my blogging started with a wiki page on Meatball Wiki. As far
as I remember, wikis preceded blogs. Sure, people had web logs where
they logged the pages they visited. But that wasn't the kind of longer
journaling that came to be associated with blogs. And frankly, that
kind of journaling also didn't happen on that wiki name page. But from
there, it grew. Edits grew longer. The topics started drifting. And
that's when I knew I needed my own wiki.

The wiki was centred around Recent Changes, of course. That's where
new pages were to be found. It still wasn't a blog and I remember
disliking blogs, thinking them to be mediocre solutions for writing.
The wiki link pattern of using camel-case was supposed to encourage
accidental linking, to invite contributions by indicating that
particular pages did not yet exist. But writing on my own, these
supposed benefits didn't really materialize. On the contrary, the
camel-case links didn't look good. The camel-case titles didn't look
good. I switched to "free" links.

Another problem was the amount of pages. My opinions changed. Was I
supposed to delete the old opinions? That hurt. Move them elsewhere?
Not great, either. Use different names and indicate somehow whether
the page was old or not? I couldn't figure it out and eventually I
settled on the current format where the date is part of the page
title. It solved all my problems.

At the same time, other people started blogging and feeds took off. I
wanted a feed for my wiki. But a feed wasn't like Recent Changes.
Recent Changes meant that pages kept reappearing when they were
edited. For many years I used the distinction between "minor" and
"major" edits for my blog. Only "major" edits showed up on the feed
and I made sure that only the first edit was marked "major". But it
was a hack and I knew it.

All of this led me to switch from Oddmuse to Oddμ. Oddmuse was a
traditional wiki, based on UseModWiki, based on even older wikis. Oddμ
is the software I currently use. It does away with version history
and usernames and implicitly expects that only very small teams use
it. Or a team of one, in my case.

As for my favourite post on the site? It's hard to say. Right now, I'd
say it is To The Young Ones from 2018. I also like my Priorities
post.

As for the future, I don't know either. I'd like to keep blogging. I'd
like to blog less about system administration. I know it's weird but I
actually don't like writing about it all that much. I do it because it
is useful. I use the blog as an external brain, as a memory extender
or memex. Unfortunately, system administration requires a lot of
memory extension where as the good blog posts require inspiration,
vulnerability, flow. It's hard to get right.

​#Blogs #Wikis ​#Wikis

2025-03-05. Found some more blog posts in a similar vein via
@[email protected]:

> The TL;DR: blogging isn't just about being read -- it's about
> learning and thinking, and having a durable proof that you can do
> both. -- It's still worth blogging in the age of AI
>
> I think it is more important to have a personal blog. In a world
> where we are constantly being pushed to write bite-sized chunks,
> writing long form content is a good way to buck the trend and retain
> our ability to think and share complex ideas. -- Why read or write
> blogs as a developer in the era of Generative AI?