Why you should blog more
Sunday, September 25, 2022
Yes, I know I said I was going to take the weekend off from blogging, but as I wrote yesterday I have convinced myself that if I take a day off from blogging then I may never blog again.
How often is that your personal story?
You want to do something, you get started doing it, and then you give up after doing it a few times because you convince yourself that you are no good at it (or worse, the Internet TROLLS convince you that you're no good at doing it) and you stop doing it anymore. The reasons are many why you stop. I'm usually too busy doing other things like trying to pay the rent during an absolutely abismal economic climate (thanks CovID++), and because I'm too busy then I just stop doing it and keep doing all of the necessary things for sustaining my life on the planet instead of doing unnecessary things such as writing into my blog.
But blogging has surprising benefits that make it a healthy alternative to not blogging.
Now let's not even get into the reasons not to blog, of which there are far more than reasons to blog. And I'm sure I'll leave some reasons to blog out, and you'll send me an email and say: "Wow, Everett, you forgot to write a reason to blog on your blog!" and then I can reply with "Well, why don't you write that reason on your own blog and perhaps I will write a hyperlink to your blog and send you some of my insane amounts of blog traffic!" and you'll quick install an analytics platform so you can test and see if I actually have insane amounts of blog traffic and you will discover that like most people I am perhaps making up the idea that my blog is popular. But I bet you my blog will be more popular than your blog if you never update your blog and I update my blog every day.
Regardless, here are some but probably not all of the reasons why you should blog more:
- One. It's good writing practice.
You will not get better at writing if you don't write more. And blogging is a form of writing. So if you take a moment to think reasonable thoughts you will discover that blogging more often will no doubt make you better at writing and writing better can lead to better opportunities and people will convince themselves that you are smarter than the robots.
- Two. It's good git practice
If you, like me, are writing your blog into a folder on your computer using a text editor on your terminal then you can just add your blog post to git and track how the blog post changes over time. Gone are the days of updating your blog in a textarea in an web browser! Well, some people still do it. There are very fancy text areas these days. In fact, [https://bogbook.com/] has a lot of very nice text areas if you want to type into them. They automagically render your text into markdown, and when you hit publish the textarea will sign your text with your public keypair. But really it is not hard to write a blog in markdown and then hit the publish button using git.
Example
git add whyyoushouldblogmore.md
git commit -m 'new post! Why you should blog more'
git push- Three. You'll get green dots on Github.
Nothing speaks more to productivity than someone dropping by your Github profile to see an endless stream of green dots. Green dots have been undeniably centralized proof that you are doing something with your life. So if you are forced to use Github because of the current societal conditions on the Internet, then you might as well get green dots. And refactoring your app from an old JavaScript framework to the next JavaScript framework is arguably not the best way to get green dots because refactors often produce bugs in your programs. Another way to get green dots is to just keep making your program bigger until it is eating all of the Internet bandwidth of everyone who is using your program.
But if you keep your blog in git you can get your green dots simply by writing things in your blog. If you can't spell right at 4:30am, then you can get more green dots by editing your blog post to fix your espelling errors. Bonus!
- Four. People can read what you think.
If you don't write things and publish them to the Internet then no one will read what you right. Am I right?
- Five. It can perhaps raise your profile.
It used to be in the past that blogging was a surefire way to get your career going. All you had to do was blog, and a horde of private investors would email saying that wanted to throw money at you. These days, blogging itself is not such a notorious activity that will make you famous, but it can still raise your profile. What is your profile? It is an esoteric business and markeiting concept that involves people being aware that you still exist on the Internet after CovID++. Before CovID++ there was something going on in the world, and during CovID++ everyone stopped doing anything to sit at home and listen to politicans extole the benefits of hastily developed experimental medicines and forcing people not to drink coffee at coffee shops as a leadup politicians demanding the world have more wars, but after CovID++ the propaganda budget tried up quickly as people realized they had been had for two years and now there is simply not enough content being produced on the Internet so really the world is yours for the taking. Except that small part of Europe that you probably don't want to be in anyway.
But I'm probably wrong and they will pull another CovID++ as soon as you start sniffling again, so go blow your nose in secret next time instead of sneezing on me.
- Six. You will see more blog traffic.
My blog traffic has moderately increased by a visible amount according to the dashboard at https://deno.com/ and perhaps that is only a temporary boost as people check back to see if I have stopped blogging. And requests do not necessarily equal blog traffic, and I'm sure there are better ways to monitors my blog traffic than just by a single metric such as requests, but I have to get to writing the next reason so I'm going to move onto that reason.
- Seven. Not many people do it anymore.
The Internet is a blogging cemetary and there has been a pandemic of people who stopped updating their blogs. This has probably been true since blogging began, but it has only become more true over time. The challenge for live blogs these days is standing out in an Internet full of dead ones.
- Eight. Writing helps you think clearer.
If you are having trouble thinking, it isn't because of the oxygen you were forced to stop breathing when you were made to wear a mask for two years. It's because you haven't sat down to write your thoughts down into your blog until you are thinking clearer. Blogging helps you get over that loss of oxygen and the ability to observe the teeth and nose of others by channeling your thoughts through your fingers into Vim where you can then save them to your disk, commit them to Git, and then if you are me deploy them to a fancy newfangled serverless environment where you can download my thoughts and try to read all of the way to the end of them without your eyes getting tired.
- Nine. You wake up earlier in the morning and drink more coffee.
If you have set a rigerous bloggin schedule for yourself then you will force yourself to get up earlier, and make more coffee, and drink more coffee while you are giving your right hand a break from typing into Vim. [takes break to drink coffee] and then you will benefit in that you can make another couple of cups of coffee before you day even begins.
Meanwhile everyone else is sleeping because they went to bed late last night and didn't wake up early to blog. They used to say that early birds catch the worms, but really waking up early means you get to drink my coffee while you are generating your blog content.
- Ten. What else is there to do?
After CovID++ everything is closed because of insane rental prices which are probably driven more by investor greed than epidemics, and I'm sure there is nothing that drives an pandemic more than forcing everyone out of houses in the winter. But no one can stop your from writing into your blog except yourself and perhaps living in a part of the world where freedom of expression is discouraged. And because the Internet is a free and open place then you can publish your blog on the Internet and people everywhere can read it simply by doing a DNS query that forwards to where your blog is hosted.
- Eleven. People will have more on your blog to link to.
If you post more posts then people who write posts elsewhere will have more places to create hyperlinks that link to your blog. Really, I think this wasn't such a good reason, but I wrote it so I'm going to write a paragraph about what it is about even if I'm not entirely convinced it was a good reason when I wrote it a half an hour ago.
- Twelve. Blogging can lead to more opportunities.
In the past it's led to more opportunuties so it could very well be that blogging can lead to more opportunities in the future.
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