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. |