nostodnayr.net

Long Live the Open Web

A little or a lot, just blog

Yesterday, Daniel Jalkut (maker of the wonderful MarsEdit and FastScripts), entreated:

Everybody, join me in writing just one blog post today, to get that independent feeling back.

What made it even more enjoyable is that he later shared links to the posts people wrote that day. I’ve been missing the feeling of the ‘blogging community’ we had in the 2000s. In the past months I’ve been looking for (and finding) new people’s blogs to follow and this helped me to find a couple more.

This site has been an effort to do my part too, for what it’s worth. I have written something here pretty much every day since I took it in hand a few months ago. This is both surprising and pleasing in equal measure.


Taking his own advice, Mr Jalkut expanded on his tweets by writing a blog post. In it, he considers why posting on social media might be more enticing:

I think people neglect to write blog posts because the feedback loop is not as tangible as the onslaught of (sometimes mechanical) likes or faves that you can receive on a social network.

I don’t know that I’ve ever got an ‘onslaught’ of interaction on Twitter, so this might apply more to others. It seems a likely factor, though. That and how posting to social media is, in most cases, much easier. He goes on:

With blogging, you need a little faith that you will gain an audience.

One thing that I did decide soon after I started this site was that I wasn’t going to care about people reading or subscribing to it. It’s for me. Should anyone read it, of course I shall be pleased, but I don’t want that to be a measure of its success.

This has one other pleasant side effect: I don’t need to rely on Google or other packages to collect analytics. There’s no JavaScript in sight.

25 May 2019