💾 Archived View for danq.me › posts › short-term-blogging captured on 2023-09-08 at 15:57:21. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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2023-07-25
There's a perception that a blog is a long-lived, ongoing thing. That it lives with and alongside its author. (This blog is, of course, an example of a long-term blog. It's been going in some form or another for over half my life, and I don't see that changing. But it's not the only kind of blog.)
But that doesn't have to be true, and I think a lot of people could benefit from "short-term" blogging. Consider:
You gain the ability to add context, crosslinking, and have permanent addresses (rather than losing eveything to the depths of a feed). You can crosspost/syndicate to your favourite socials if that's your poison..
/2023/07/pexels-arthouse-studio-4312207-cropped.jpg
Writing what you learn helps you remember it; writing what you learn in a public space helps others learn too and makes it easy to search for your discoveries later. (Personally, I really love the serendipity of asking a web search engine for the solution to a problem and finding a result that turns out to be something that I myself wrote, long ago!)
My D&D group does this at levellers.blog! That site won't continue to be updated forever - the party will someday retire or, more-likely, come to a glorious but horrific end - but it'll always live on as a reminder of what we achieved.
One of my favourite examples of such a blog was 52 Reflect (My previous posts about 52 Reflect: Challenge Robin, Twatt, Brixton to Brighton by Boris Bike, Ending on a High (and associated photo/note)) (now integrated into its successor The Improbable Blog). For 52 consecutive weeks my partner's brother Robin blogged about adventures that took him out of his home in London and it was amazing. The project's finished, but a blog was absolutely the right medium for it because now it's got a "forever home" on the Web (imagine if he'd posted instead to Twitter, only for that platform to turn into a flaming turd).
I don't often shill for my employer, but I genuinely believe that the free tier on WordPress.com is an excellent way to give a forever home to your short-term blog (One of my favourite features of WordPress.com is the fact that it's built atop the world's most-popular blogging software and you can export all your data at any time, so there's absolutely no lock-in: if you want to migrate to a competitor or even host your own blog, it's really easy to do so!). Did you know that you can type new.blog (or blog.new; both work!) into your browser to start one?
What are you going to write about?
Source for seaside scenery photoblogging image, on Pexels
levellers.blog - weblog of The Levellers, D&D party
52 Reflect: Robin's one-year blog with 52 entries, one for each of 52 weekly self-challenges
Challenge Robin: my blog post about one of Robin's 52 challenges
Twatt: my blog post about one of Robin's 52 challenges
Brixton to Brighton by Boris Bike: my blog post about one of Robin's 52 challenges
Ending on a High: my blog post about one of Robin's 52 challenges
My blog post announcing that I'd helped Robin move 52 Reflect into The Improbable Blog
