blogging

When I restarted this little writing project, I set a goal of 2 posts per week. Yesterday was the last day of my fourth week, so I thought I should take a moment to grade my little experiment. For the purposes of this exercise, I’d previously decided a week starts on Sunday, and a blog post should contain at least 300 characters of text I wrote (e.g., block quotes don’t count). Anything else is what I’d consider a micro-blog post and not part of my personal goal.

The post you’re currently reading is my eleventh in less than four weeks. I’m quite pleased with that. Eleven posts with more than 10,000 combined words in 25 days is probably some of the most prolific blogging I’ve ever done. But for how I defined my goal, I haven’t managed to stay within the parameters.

This project kicked-off mid-week, but I still managed to publish 4 posts before the next Sunday. In my second week, I hammered out three posts on separate days. That all tracks for the excitement that comes from a new or revived hobby.

But, like always happens with a new or revived hobby, the shine wears off at some point. In my third week of this experiment, I only found the time to publish one post. The same ended up true for Week 4. Luckily, I know what the problem is.

I currently have about 10 unfinished drafts of posts sitting in Drafts. Some are further along than others, but collectively, it’s approximately 5,500 unpublished words. So, basically, about a third of my writing this month never even got published.

I had started and probably could have finished my post about new data centers and still hit my weekly goal, but I had a hard time letting go and calling it done. I don’t use LLMs to write, but I did ask Claude at one point to review what I had written and it said that what I had resembled two different essays shoved together.

Instead of taking that feedback as a sign to publish them as two posts I redoubled my efforts to make it one much longer, but hopefully cohesive one. I don’t know that I succeeded. I certainly didn’t feel that way. Finishing it and publishing it felt like a chore by the end. I just wanted to be done with it.

If I’d published them as two, separate, lighter posts I think I would have gotten them up faster and been able to be happier with them. It was the fact that it grew so long that made me have a hard time letting go.

I’m still going to keep my posting goal at 2 per week, but the thing I’ll try to consider more is to publishing faster, shorter and earlier than I might think I should because the alternative is not publishing at all.

Last week I was talking to my friend Josh about blogging and our conversation was self-inspiring enough that I decided to set up another blog.

Well, now my new blog is my old blog too. For the past few years, I’d been occasionally posting at b10g.xyz using a multiple blog platforms hosted on various cloud services over a span of four years. The version I retired last week was hosted on Cloudflare Pages with a site statically generated using Lume from Markdown files I kept in a private GitHub repo. Over the blog’s life, I’d also used Astro and Next.js on Vercel, hosted the current version for a bit on Deno Deploy, and briefly experimented with Emdash. This final version was what worked the best for me. Moving isn’t an indictment of Lume, Cloudflare, or even using Markdown in Git as a CMS. All of those things are great, except maybe the last one, and I still recommend them wholeheartedly. Just not for me.

I originally wasn’t planning to migrate, because that felt like “fixing” something that wasn’t exactly broken. But something was broken. Even though I’d published more blog posts in the last year than I had in a while, I’d come to realize that my self-managed setup lacked restraint. Any feature or tweak I wanted to add, I could. And with the help of AI agents, I often did. What I ended up with was more than enough to validate my desire to write, but I wasn’t publishing all the things I wanted to write because managing what I’d built took more of the time. I still have drafts in my Notes.app that never saw the light of day because actually publishing involved sitting down at the right machine and doing a few manual steps that I couldn’t easily do on mobile.

I’ve learned too late in my writing journey that wrangling your workflow can will drain your capacity for writing and creating if you let it. I really enjoy building platforms. It’s my day job. But I want writing to be joy, not more work. Micro.blog as a platform is exactly what I want. It’s available anywhere, it helps me syndicate to my various social accounts, it has no ads or built-in analytics, but most importantly… it has constraints I can’t change. I’m so excited I signed up for an annual subscription.

Building was fun, but I think writing will be even more fun.