Why I Blog

I was on a walk with my friend Carlos back in December. While we were walking we got to talking about the evolution of each of our personal sites. Carlos is a designer and photologs his life on Instagram. His website serves as an index of personal projects and as a portfolio of his beautiful design work.

Mornington Peninsula National Park near Melbourne, Australia where Carlos invited me for a hike

Why do you blog?

I was sort of surprised by the question (doesn’t everyone?), but then I remembered that it’s a pretty unusual thing to still write on the web for fun. It made me thing back to teenager-me getting really excited about Blogspot and, well before then, all of my dottk domains¹ (please don’t try to find them).

I thought for a while and came up with two reasons that I still prefer this to any other place on the web to publish to.

It’s Mine

This website and almost all of the code² that powers it is mine. I’m a web developer first (designer and entrepreneur second) and so I take some pride in trying to make this website a nice place to see what I’m about. It reflects my sensibilities and is an extension of my personality. I think somewhat often about how I will make it persist after I am dead as a little “I was here”.

I still believe in the old school vision of the web as mostly a network of personal documents, published independently, all linked together as a graph with not too much density between one node or another³.

HTML is still fun and easy to write just as it was when I was an 8 year old in computer camp writing websites that looked like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<HTML>
    <HEAD>
        <TITLE>AGE OF EMPIRES RULEZ!!!</TITLE>
        <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Notepad">
        <BGSOUND SRC="medieval_music.mid" LOOP="INFINITE">
    </HEAD>
    <BODY BGCOLOR="#000000" TEXT="#00FF00" LINK="#FF0000" VLINK="#FF00FF">
        <CENTER>
            <FONT FACE="Comic Sans MS" SIZE="7" COLOR="red">
                <marquee>*** WELCOME TO MY AGE OF EMPIRES PAGE ***</marquee>
            </FONT>
        </CENTER>
    </BODY>
</html>

It’s Cathartic

Sometimes I rant on here about things that irk me. I don’t particularly like that I do that, but it’s an honest representation of what’s going on upstairs. Other times I will just write to organize my learnings or share things that I find interesting. The act of all of this makes me feel good for one reason or another. I don’t need to totally understand why, I just know that it works.

I like to put things in order. This is a place where I can do that for my thoughts and moments that I want to share.