Title: Why do I write this blog?

	Title: Why do I write this blog?
	Author: Solène
	Date: 14 May 2021
	Tags: blog
	Description:

	# Why do I write this blog?

	I decided to have a blog when I started to gather personal notes when
	playing with FreeBSD, while I wanted my notes to be easy to read and
	understand I also chose to publish them online so I could read them
	even at work.

	The earlier articles were more about how to do X Y, they were reminders
	for myself that I was sharing with the world, I never intended to have
	readers at that time. I enjoyed writing and sharing, I had a few
	friends who were happy to subscribe to the RSS feed and they were
	proof-reading after my publications.

	Over time, I wanted to make it a place to speak about unusual topic
	like StumpWM, Common LISP, Guix and weird Unix tricks. It made me very
	happy because I got feedback from more people over time so I kept doing
	this.

	At some point, I got a lot more involved in the OpenBSD community and I
	think most of my audience is related to OpenBSD now. I want to share
	what you can do with OpenBSD, how it would be different than with
	another system, steps-by-steps guides. I hope it helped some people to
	jump to OpenBSD and they enjoy it as well now. At the same time, I try
	to be as honest as possible when I publish about something, this blog
	is making absolutely no money, there are no ads, I would have
	absolutely nothing to gain not being honest in my articles. I value
	precision and accuracy, I try to link to official documentation most of
	the time instead of doing a copy/paste that will become obsolete over
	time.

	Speaking of obsolescence, I usually re-read all my texts (and it takes
	a long time) once a year, to check if everything seems still correct.
	I could see packages that not longer exist, configuration syntax that
	may have changed or just a software version that is really old, this
	takes a lot of time because I value all my publications and not only
	the most recent one.

	I write because I have fun writing and I'm happy to make my readers
	happy. I often get some emails from people I don't know giving me
	their thoughts about an article, I'm always surprised but very happy
	when this happen and I always reply to those persons.

	I have no schedule when I write, sometimes I plan texts but I can't get
	them right so I delete them. Sometimes months can pass between two
	publications, I do not really care, I'm not targeting any publication
	rate, that would be against the fun.

	# Why not you?

	This may sound odd, but I wanted to write this text mainly to encourage
	other people to write and publish their own blog. Why not you? On the
	technical side, there are many free hosting available in the opensource
	community and you have plenty of awesome static website generators
	available nowadays.

	If you want to start the adventure, just write and publish. Propose a
	way to contact you, I think it's important for readers to be able to
	reach you, they are very nice (at least I never had any issue): they
	could report mistakes or give you links to things you may enjoy on the
	same topic as your publication.

	Don't think of money, styling, hit rate, visit numbers, it doesn't
	matter. The true gems on the Internet are those old fashions websites
	of early 2000 with many ugly jpg, wrong colors but with insane content
	about unusual and highly specific topics. I have in mind the example
	of a website about a French movie, the author had found every spot in
	France where the movie has been filmed, he has contacted every cast in
	the movie even the most insignificant ones to ask about stories and
	gathered many pictures and stories about the making of the film. None
	of this would ever happen in a web driven by money and ranking and
	visitors.