Why Blogs Matter

Thursday, February 6, 2025

This blog had its tenth birthday last July, and I forgot to celebrate.

I had no idea what I was doing when I shared that first essay in 2014. Since then, I’ve written about a hundred more posts. Each is now swirling around the ether, a faint signal in the noise for those who share an interest in keeping a journal, or reading great books, or managing finances on a Mac, or taking better notes. Or being a better father, or living aboard a boat, or suffering an unimaginable loss.

An odd assortment, I know.

Readers from sixty countries have visited my blog. I have corresponded with dozens of people with questions or comments about what I’ve written. I’ve also become friends with other bloggers who care deeply about many of the same things. It’s a marvel of the internet age that we have this medium to find each other, rare and valuable needles in an unending hayloft.

Who knew such a thing could evolve from sharing that first essay?

Why A Blog?

I recall my teenage son’s bemusement when he discovered I kept a blog. “Dad, what? You’re a blogger now?” he asked with a chuckle. Back then, blogs were not cool (sadly, they are still not). I read more than a few articles at the time that said the glory days of blogging were long past.

I didn’t fully understand what I had started. I knew sharing my experiences could make a small difference in the lives of others who sought a similar path in life. I wanted a way to practice writing that didn’t involve business jargon. And even then, I knew I wanted to carve out my own place on the internet away from the ilk of Twitter or FaceBook. But I still didn’t know what I was doing.

Ten years later, I have a better idea about why keeping a blog matters to me:

1. To find my voice. It took staring down my 50th birthday to believe I had a valuable perspective to share. My writing to that point had been private musings in a journal or business memos.

In 2014, I took a sabbatical from work, which profoundly changed me. I started to look at the world as a writer might, thinking differently about life, family, and our purpose here on earth. While I enjoyed my career in finance and strategy, I yearned to explore broader, more humane interests. Over time, the blog became an outlet for these thoughts, helping me find a writing voice free from financial acronyms and corporate buzzwords. I am thankful for this.

And while the writing itself is never easy for me, I love the outcome of having written.

2. To discover what I think. It’s easy to fool yourself in a journal by writing open-ended, rambling thoughts without any conclusion or action. But writing for an unknown audience requires more thought and rigor. I have to open my mind to the variety of perspectives others might bring to the subject, which helps me avoid tunnel vision and insular thinking.

Writing a longer post or essay forces me to explore a topic more deeply than I otherwise would. I’ve reshaped dozens of posts after discovering — once I started writing — that I no longer believed my original surface-level premise.

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

— Joan Didion, Let Me Tell You What I Mean

Writing gathers a hundred swirling half-notions and back-eddies into an orderly stream of coherent thought. Writing for others dredges that stream into a navigable river we can travel down together.

So, yeah. Keeping a blog makes you smarter.

3. For connection. The internet can be an awful place, but sometimes it can surprise you. Through blogging, I have connected with many interesting people who reached out after reading one of my posts.

These connections mostly happen through blog comments. When someone replies, I get a little ping on my phone. This always brings a smile to my face. Often, the comment provides a unique perspective that shifts how I think about what I’ve written. Sometimes, a caring person wants to compliment my writing or express compassion for something I’ve faced. Blog comments are one of the ways I know that most people are kind and good.

Many bloggers worry about allowing comments on their posts. I get this. I use the Akismet spam filter, which has blocked over two thousand (!) spam comments over the life of this blog. The plug-in whisks them away before I even see them. In ten years, I’ve encountered less than a handful of inappropriate replies. Maybe I’ve been lucky. It sure isn’t this way on web forums or social media. Still, I doubt I would have kept up this blog without this ongoing stream of feedback and encouragement.

Why Not Use Social Media?

I spend about $200 a year between hosting and domain registrations to keep this blog running. Why spend all that when I could post my thoughts on social media for free?

First, sites like Facebook and X and their algorithmic cousins aren’t the right place for long-form writing. Attention spans max out around 15 seconds on those endless scroll sites. Few will take the time to read a 2,000-word essay.

Second, the posts on these sites are often staged to make life seem a little too perfect. Instagram influencers have made this an art. It’s all so fake. The best blogs tell it like it is, the good and the bad. The glass may be half full, but it’s never overflowing.

Finally, I would much rather pay for my little corner of the internet than allow my writing to be a source of profit for politically-minded billionaires. But that’s me. I’m not part of their target market.

What about Medium or SubStack?

I follow a few excellent writers on SubStack and have shared some essays on Medium. Both are free to writers and offer a simple way to get started with little effort or complexity. But they’re not for me. I have no desire to monetize my writing. I’ll never allow ads on my blog. I am not interested in growing my subscriber base or offering a paid newsletter. I don’t want barriers between my writing and potential readers.

To me, these platforms feel like just more sophisticated forms of social media, with many contributors striving to collect followers at the expense of thoughtful writing. I understand writers need an income, so I don’t begrudge this approach. It’s just not something I need or want.

WordPress and Micro.blog

My blog operates on the open-source version of WordPress on a third-party host. WordPress powers almost half the internet, so it's incredibly robust and customizable. And complicated.

A little over a year ago, I started using Micro.blog for shorter posts I might otherwise have shared on social media. Micro.blog is a little hard to describe. It’s a hosting platform, an Indie web community of like-minded bloggers, and a cross-posting service that enables the POSSE ("Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere”) model of blogging.

Over the past year, I shared around a hundred posts on Micro.blog. Most of these relate to books I've read, inspiring quotes, links to interesting articles, or travel photography. Micro.blog syndicates these automatically to accounts on Bluesky and Mastodon. I keep a rolling feed of these on my home page.

I considered merging WordPress into Micro.blog to make things easier on myself. I’ve never been happy with the format of emails that WordPress sends out to subscribers, nor do I like that readers need an account to subscribe or like a post. Maintaining a WordPress blog is complex with all its settings, CSS styles, and plug-ins. Things seem to break a lot. Using Micro.blog would be a comparative breeze.

When I tested merging the sites, the flood of short posts overwhelmed and obscured the longer, more meaningful essays, making the site feel cluttered. In addition, the hundreds of comments posted on this blog over the years would not carry over. Losing all that feedback felt like too much of a loss. After all, this is a collaborative effort.

So, for now, these two sites stand apart, serving different purposes.¹

Favorite Blogs

I follow about 75 blogs using the Unread RSS reader. Some publish every day, others less frequently. I’m sharing four of my absolute favorites. Each represents an inspiration to me of what a personal blog can be.

1. Jamie Todd Rubin. An exceptional blog with thousands of informative posts about reading, writing, technology, and family. Jamie has probably influenced my reading choices more than anyone on the internet.
2. Patrick La Roque. Patrick is a photographer who writes like a poet. He’s a big fan of the Bear app, which is how I got to know him. He considers his blog a journal, and as such, it covers a wide range of topics. They’re all great.
3. Writing Slowly. Richard blogs about the craft of writing and note-taking. His site is a treasure trove of tips, advice, and anecdotes. If you are interested in the Zettelkasten approach to note-taking, Richard’s blog will be a rewarding destination.
4. A Room of My Own. Stella writes beautifully about many of the topics I hold dear. Her reflective style is refreshing and thought-provoking. I can’t wait to read what she writes next.

The Blog Is Dead. Long Live the Blog.

Recently, a blog I follow ended its seventeen-year run with this sad farewell:

I do think that the end really is here for the blogosphere though. This time it really is different. I’ve weathered many ups and downs in the blogosphere over my 17 years in it, but now it feels like the end of the blogging era.

Maybe this veteran blogger is correct. Perhaps it’s silly to keep a blog in this age of artificial intelligence and ubiquitous social media. Maybe, after all these years of gloomy predictions, it really is the end of blogs.

But here’s the thing. Our attitudes naturally shift from optimism when we are young to meliorism (the belief that the world can be made better with effort) when we are middle-aged, and finally, to cranky pessimism when we are old. I feel the pull, but I refuse to give in to pessimism.

So, call me cautiously optimistic about the future of blogging. Registering a personal domain and starting a blog has never been easier. Indie web firms like Micro.blog are helping creatives take ownership of their online contributions instead of depending on platforms that trap and resell their content. More and more people are recoiling from social media’s apparent bias, algorithmic manipulation, and spin. The need for online truth and honesty has never been higher.

And it’s a big world out there. There’s always room for one more voice, for one more blog. If I’ve learned anything over these past ten years, it’s that echoes from blog posts can reverberate a long time and be heard in surprising places.

Maybe the best time to start a blog was twenty years ago, but the next best time is now.

Do you keep a blog? Or follow one that you love? Please share in the comment section below.

1. In the course of writing this post, I made some improvements to WordPress. I created a new landing page that helps new readers find posts more easily. I found a setting deep in the bowels of the system that allows readers to comment on posts without needing a Wordpress account. And I switched to MailPoet, a service that manages email subscriptions to a weekly digest of new posts. ↩

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