My first year of blogging with Write.as
One year ago today I published the first post of this blog hosted at Write.as, ending a long quest for a better publishing platform.
I had grown frustrated with the clunkyness and limitations of Blogger, where I settled for the prior threee years. So I set out to research a lightweight blogging platform with good support for technical writing that could replace Blogger, and finally went with Write.as. One year and 225 posts later, I'd say Write.as was the right choice despite a major missing feature, post previews. I've never been so productive, neither with Blogger nor any other publishing platform.
Another fortunate decision, intentionally against the conventional wisdom of SEO, was to publish a personal blog that focuses on me rather than remaining confined in a specific niche. This let me write about new interests or experiences, adapting to the wandering and widening of my interests and activities.
The first year on Write.as was eventful. Two of my posts went viral on Hacker News, one on why I use a Chromebox and the other on my encounter with Medley Interlisp, and brought tens of thousands of views.
That was exciting. But over the past year I also joined the Fediverse, and sharing some of my blog posts there generated more interesting, meaninfgul, and lasting interactions than the drive-by traffic of viral posts.
Aside from the rewards and validation of such success metrics, an unexpected benefit of the first year of blogging at Write.as has been writing for an audience of one: me.
I'm using the blog more and more as a sort of lab journal for my hobby programming and tech projects. Since I work on a number of projects, and put them aside for some time before resuming, the blog has proven invaluable in getting back up to speed with projects or track useful resources by reviewing and referencing past posts.
So, even if nobody read my blog, I would still gain the most benefit from this personal space and online archive.
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