I've been asking myself this every now and then. I'm not a party person and while I've learned to do small talk, I don't talk as much as I write, I think. Recently, @adam@social.lol blogged about the Blog Question Challenge. It reminded me of similar posts of mine. 2024-03-07 Why do we even blog?. 2010-08-05 Why Blog. I keep wondering.
2024-03-07 Why do we even blog?
The Blog Question Challenge asks the following questions:
I think my blogging started with a wiki page on Meatball Wiki. As far as I remember, wikis preceded blogs. Sure, people had web logs where they logged the pages they visited. But that wasn't the kind of longer journaling that came to be associated with blogs. And frankly, that kind of journaling also didn't happen on that wiki name page. But from there, it grew. Edits grew longer. The topics started drifting. And that's when I knew I needed my own wiki.
The wiki was centred around Recent Changes, of course. That's where new pages were to be found. It still wasn't a blog and I remember disliking blogs, thinking them to be mediocre solutions for writing. The wiki link pattern of using camel-case was supposed to encourage accidental linking, to invite contributions by indicating that particular pages did not yet exist. But writing on my own, these supposed benefits didn't really materialize. On the contrary, the camel-case links didn't look good. The camel-case titles didn't look good. I switched to "free" links.
Another problem was the amount of pages. My opinions changed. Was I supposed to delete the old opinions? That hurt. Move them elsewhere? Not great, either. Use different names and indicate somehow whether the page was old or not? I couldn't figure it out and eventually I settled on the current format where the date is part of the page title. It solved all my problems.
At the same time, other people started blogging and feeds took off. I wanted a feed for my wiki. But a feed wasn't like Recent Changes. Recent Changes meant that pages kept reappearing when they were edited. For many years I used the distinction between "minor" and "major" edits for my blog. Only "major" edits showed up on the feed and I made sure that only the first edit was marked "major". But it was a hack and I knew it.
All of this led me to switch from Oddmuse to Oddµ. Oddmuse was a traditional wiki, based on UseModWiki, based on even older wikis. Oddµ is the software I currently use. It does away with version history and usernames and implicitly expects that only very small teams use it. Or a team of one, in my case.
As for my favourite post on the site? It's hard to say. Right now, I'd say it is To The Young Ones from 2018. I also like my Priorities post.
As for the future, I don't know either. I'd like to keep blogging. I'd like to blog less about system administration. I know it's weird but I actually don't like writing about it all that much. I do it because it is useful. I use the blog as an external brain, as a memory extender or memex. Unfortunately, system administration requires a lot of memory extension where as the good blog posts require inspiration, vulnerability, flow. It's hard to get right.
#Blogs #Wikis