The thoughts that escaped the chum bucket of my brain Zola 2025-12-31T00:00:00+00:00 https://blog.plasticsquid.com/tags/writing/atom.xml 2025-12-31T00:00:00+00:00 2025-12-31T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://blog.plasticsquid.com/2025/the-purpose-of-a-blog/ <p>And so, I find myself entering the blogosphere, about two decades too late. Three if you don't restrict yourself to the period of time where penning a blog would be something I would (a) be interested in, and (b) be capable of.</p> <p>The death of the blog<sup class="footnote-reference" id="fr-blogdeath-1"><a href="#fn-blogdeath">1</a></sup> has many contributing factors that I would not be qualified to comment upon<sup class="footnote-reference" id="fr-google-1"><a href="#fn-google">2</a></sup>, but the latest bugle-batten screw in the coffin is the slew of LLM-spewed SEO-spam content-farms generating "<a href="https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/01/google-dont-make-bite-sized-content-for-llms-if-you-care-about-search-rank/">chunked</a>" pages, masquerading as Real People™ writing Real Content™. You know the ones — they have a 10-15 point numbered table of contents two pages of scrolling down outlining the five-Ws of whatever the topic at hand is, and contain about 100 times as many words as would be necessary to actually address the headline question<sup class="footnote-reference" id="fr-hypocriticism-1"><a href="#fn-hypocriticism">3</a></sup>.<br /> The web <a href="https://henry.codes/writing/a-website-to-destroy-all-websites/">feels bad</a>.</p> <split /> <p>So then, why start now, at arguably the worst time ever for discoverability?<br /> Certainly not because I expect people to be interested in reading it! There are hundreds of thousands of blogs (millions?) out there, but most of them do <a href="https://idiallo.com/blog/nobody-is-going-to-read-it">not receive significant traffic</a>. This is, therefor, more <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46009894">for my benefit</a> than anything. A few posts I read recently pushed me towards actually executing on the vague inkling of an interest I had already. They were:</p> <ol> <li><a href="https://www.raptitude.com/2025/12/maybe-the-default-settings-are-too-high/">Maybe the Default Settings Are Too High</a><br /> Slowing down consumption is one thing (and a difficult one at that), but <em>producing</em> forces you to slow down, and writing forces you to cogitate thoughts in ways that you can often get by without doing.</li> <li><a href="https://github.com/readme/guides/publishing-your-work">Publishing your work increases your luck</a>:<br /> This follows another post I read some time ago (<a href="https://www.swyx.io/create-luck">How to Create Luck</a>) and a growing interest in the concept of luck as a commodity rather than a force of nature. And I hear you say, "but you just said you do not expect this to reach an audience! How then do you expect it to make an impact?", and you would be right. This is a secondary goal — icing on top of the cake of improving soft skills, if you will.</li> <li><a href="https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/start-a-blog">Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog</a>:<br /> Henrik has this <a href="https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query">rich</a> worldview around writing (amongst other topics) that always makes me stop and spend the next hour thinking about (and unwrapping) the presented ideas in his essays.</li> </ol> <p>I already have a personal journalling habit (albeit a poorly-regulated one this year), but I've been wanting to develop my professional writing skills and portfolio for some time on top of this. This was off the back of some more traditionally blog-inspiring posts that have been ratcheting around in the back of my mind for a while:</p> <ol> <li><a href="https://www.seangoedecke.com/technical-communication/">To get better at technical writing, lower your expectations</a></li> <li><a href="https://writinghabit.com">How to build a writing habit</a></li> </ol> <hr /> <p>Given the above, then, what makes a blog "good", i.e. worth not only writing, but reading?</p> <p>My checklist of admirable traits for a blog to hold is:</p> <ul> <li>Information-dense — in engineering, we would say that posts have a high signal-to-noise ratio. In current-year, we say it's not slop. There is <a href="https://www.seangoedecke.com/dont-feed-me-slop/">an argument made by some</a> that it is possible to produce valid LLM-created content — but it <em>must</em> respect the reader. In short, it should provide maximum user benefit per unit of time and cognition spent observing the post.</li> <li>Relevant — all posts have a target audience. It is, of course, fine to have a blog that has mixed posts, but it is preferable if they're split into separate feeds<sup class="footnote-reference" id="fr-feeds-1"><a href="#fn-feeds">4</a></sup>, and at minimum, a single post should stay on-topic so that the readers that have selected to read the post don't end up reading about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_duck">mandarin duck dimorphism</a> when they were interested in reading a post about app domains and dynamically loaded assemblies.</li> <li>Delvable — claims should ideally be cited, and the more outlinks that are given, the better. If a post looks like <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/JustForFun/TVTropesWillRuinYourLife">a TvTropes article</a> based on how many blue and purple links it contains and how much of the rabbit hole volume is accessible from it, all the better.</li> </ul> <p>That is a pretty high bar, and while I'm not sure I will be able to claim to meet it, I think it's a good schema to aspire to.<br /> There are also a slew of other reasons why, such as learning new technologies (e.g. static site generation), more about the world of hosting, and a bunch of <a href="https://indieweb.org">IndieWeb</a> technologies and paradigms such as <a href="https://indieweb.org/Webmention">WebMentions</a>, <a href="https://indieweb.org/POSSE">POSSE</a><sup class="footnote-reference" id="fr-posse-1"><a href="#fn-posse">5</a></sup>, and <a href="https://slashpages.net">slash-pages</a>.</p> <hr /> <p>So then, the purpose of a blog is... what? It would be impossible to create a succinct answer to that question<sup class="footnote-reference" id="fr-blog-purpose-1"><a href="#fn-blog-purpose">6</a></sup>, but for now — in this moment — the purpose of <em>this</em> blog is for me to parcel up thoughts, learnings, and references, to force myself to distill the essence of such material into a single artefact. And, if I'm lucky, for my <a href="https://www.emailtofuture.com/blog/send-emails-to-your-future-self">future me</a> (and perhaps wandering strangers) to come across and gain some insight or knowledge from this snapshot (even if that's only that the me in this moment that wrote that was a fool for thinking so).</p> <p>Until then... adventure awaits!<sup class="footnote-reference" id="fr-huzzah-1"><a href="#fn-huzzah">7</a></sup></p> <section class="footnotes"> <ol class="footnotes-list"> <li id="fn-blogdeath"> <p>The blog is, of course, only <em>mostly</em> dead. By <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40949636">all</a> <a href="https://idiallo.com/blog/what-its-like-blogging-in-2025">accounts</a>, blogging is actually still well alive and ticking, only... you can't, or don't want to, find blogs. <a href="#fr-blogdeath-1">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn-google"> <p>If I <em>were</em> to comment, it would be to suggest that most of this is a <em>discoverability</em> issue, and can be laid at corps' like Google's feet as they ever prioritise money over user experience.<br /> There's obviously some element of SEO gaming, but alternate engines like crowd-favourite Kagi don't have as much of this issue, due to their alternate incentive structure and therefore motivation in ranking pages.<br /> See also: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma">The Innovator's Dilemma</a><br /> The other major factor is social-media-like platforms siphoning up ever more of the available pool of attention using their web of dark patterns — another topic that could I am also insufficiently qualified to comment on, and deserves its own (series of) commentar(y|ies). <a href="#fr-google-1">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn-hypocriticism"> <p>Yes, I am aware of the irony of my own non-concise writing. If I had more time, I would have written a shorter post, don't let perfect be the enemy of good, etcetera, etcetera. <a href="#fr-hypocriticism-1">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn-feeds"> <p>RSS/Atom is of course the only way that anyone ever reads blog posts, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something. <a href="#fr-feeds-1">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn-posse"> <p>I honestly have little interest in syndicating elsewhere, at this point. Perhaps if I ever generate some content worth <em>discussing</em>, I'll reconsider — but first, I should get around to implementing webmention support! <a href="#fr-posse-1">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn-blog-purpose"> <p>Save for perhaps the evergreen "42". <a href="#fr-blog-purpose-1">↩</a></p> </li> <li id="fn-huzzah"> <p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY3y6zNTiLs">Huzzah!</a> <a href="#fr-huzzah-1">↩</a></p> </li> </ol> </section>