If I only take the current blog/domain and the one before that it will be 20 years in October, but for the stuff before that I’d actually have to check some archive.. Don’t even remember if it was the year 2000, so maybe 25 years soon…
Glad it still counts if you take arbitrarily long breaks that are shorter than 1 year ;)
Hello, original author here. I was debating whether this article was on-topic or not because no tag other than “historical” seemed truly accurate… but in the end, knowing that there are various avid bloggers in this community, I thought it may be on topic and spark an interesting discussion. (I also added “web” because, looking back to other blog-related posts, they seemed to all be tagged this way.)
I’m curious to know, if you have been a blogger for a long time too, whether your experience aligns with this at all or not. Things have changed quite a bit over the years but we all are still reading long-form content via similar channels!
Why “weblog” and not “blog”? Because the “blog” term wasn’t yet the popular one.
My blog, started 22 years ago (here’s my own 20th birthday post), is still called Simon Willison’s Weblog - I honestly hadn’t considered how outdated (or even anachronistic) that term is in present usage! I kinda like that.
On the Substack v.s. self-hosted thing: something that’s been working well for me is that I operate my own custom Django-app blog on https://simonwillison.net/ and then have a Substack newsletter version on https://simonw.substack.com/ which I send out manually every week or two by copying over content from my blog - very similar to what you’re doing.
I think this makes more sense for my posting frequency: I post multiple tiny items on my blog every day (links, quotes) which would FLOOD people’s email inboxes if I sent them all out as Substack posts. So… people who want my content via email can subscribe to Substack and get everything bundled together.
In terms of content: your goal of ~2 long-form posts a month is about what I’ve settled on too - I have “weeknotes” as well (not posted every week, more every two-weeks) but those are more about personal accountability than producing content for other people. You can see a list of my long-form writing on my “year” archive pages, which don’t (yet) include links and quotes: https://simonwillison.net/2024/
Blogging a few times a month is an incredibly effective way of getting better at writing! I can absolutely tell the quality difference between my more recent posts and posts I wrote years ago - and I’m getting faster at writing too, which is really useful for keeping up that frequency of publishing.
As for traffic… it’s still true for me that nothing spikes my numbers more than a Hacker News homepage hit (or a one-time Musk tweet, which was a bit weird!)
What I value more though is having writing I can link people to. I participate in so many conversations where I can say “I wrote more about this last year… URL”.
With blogging the thing that matters most isn’t how many people read your stuff, it’s who those people are. I’ve had so many great in-person conversations at networking events, or invitations to speak at conferences, or job offers (some of which I took) which stemmed from the right person reading something interesting on my blog.
You can juice those numbers by not being shy to send people a link to something you’ve written!
What I value more though is having writing I can link people to. I participate in so many conversations where I can say “I wrote more about this last year… URL”.
Oh yeah… this has been super useful for me at work – particularly in the job I’m at now: I’m working on a Bazel migration and I have so many articles I can refer to (I used to be in the Bazel team at Google, blogging about the internals of the tool) that it has kinda become a meme that I’ll reply with a blog post haha :)
I started around 2004, I was around 15-16. I did a blog where I took a photo every day and wrote about it.
It lasted ten years until I got kind of bored doing it every day (and frankly, life got more boring).
Now I have site that’s been going for another 10 years but I post less frequently, a few times a month maybe.
My biggest regret is that I lost most/all of the old site and pictures because I didn’t know shit about websites or photos or backups etc back then. I kept switching between blog platforms because the grass was always greener, which compressed the images more and more until they were just the thumbnails. Then I ended up in a situation where I didn’t know how to export the posts, and it just got FUBAR. I really wish I’d known about SSGs etc back then, it would have been much simpler to have a local copy of my posts.
It’s a shame because it’s a period in time where I went from school, through to college (UK college), to university, met my now-wife, travelled a lot, started a regrettable career using computers etc etc.
That’s sad and I’ve experienced something similar. I didn’t add many pictures to my posts from ~15-20 years ago, but I did add some, and it’s unfortunate that the copies I have are of very low resolution due to blog hosting shenanigans…
The only common observation I have with your experiences is the move towards writing longer pieces which I think was the influence of twitter etc and it’s actually something I’m trying to reverse for my own blog: I’m trying to do less editing of blog posts and write shorter ones more frequently.
Slightly surprisingly my link log https://dotat.at/:/ is older than my blog. I think back then I was still mostly on usenet; it took a few years for me to drift away.
Huh, I’ve been blogging for 20 years too. Totally forgot :D
https://gerikson.com/blog/index.html#footer
Oh you ancient ones. I only started in July 2007, apparently: https://kaushikghose.wordpress.com/2007/07/10/in-the-begining/
If I only take the current blog/domain and the one before that it will be 20 years in October, but for the stuff before that I’d actually have to check some archive.. Don’t even remember if it was the year 2000, so maybe 25 years soon…
Glad it still counts if you take arbitrarily long breaks that are shorter than 1 year ;)
Hello, original author here. I was debating whether this article was on-topic or not because no tag other than “historical” seemed truly accurate… but in the end, knowing that there are various avid bloggers in this community, I thought it may be on topic and spark an interesting discussion. (I also added “web” because, looking back to other blog-related posts, they seemed to all be tagged this way.)
I’m curious to know, if you have been a blogger for a long time too, whether your experience aligns with this at all or not. Things have changed quite a bit over the years but we all are still reading long-form content via similar channels!
OK, this made me chuckle straight away:
My blog, started 22 years ago (here’s my own 20th birthday post), is still called Simon Willison’s Weblog - I honestly hadn’t considered how outdated (or even anachronistic) that term is in present usage! I kinda like that.
On the Substack v.s. self-hosted thing: something that’s been working well for me is that I operate my own custom Django-app blog on https://simonwillison.net/ and then have a Substack newsletter version on https://simonw.substack.com/ which I send out manually every week or two by copying over content from my blog - very similar to what you’re doing.
I think this makes more sense for my posting frequency: I post multiple tiny items on my blog every day (links, quotes) which would FLOOD people’s email inboxes if I sent them all out as Substack posts. So… people who want my content via email can subscribe to Substack and get everything bundled together.
I wrote about how I run my Substack newsletter here: Semi-automating a Substack newsletter with an Observable notebook - or you can try out the tool I built for this at observablehq.com/@simonw/blog-to-newsletter.
In terms of content: your goal of ~2 long-form posts a month is about what I’ve settled on too - I have “weeknotes” as well (not posted every week, more every two-weeks) but those are more about personal accountability than producing content for other people. You can see a list of my long-form writing on my “year” archive pages, which don’t (yet) include links and quotes: https://simonwillison.net/2024/
Blogging a few times a month is an incredibly effective way of getting better at writing! I can absolutely tell the quality difference between my more recent posts and posts I wrote years ago - and I’m getting faster at writing too, which is really useful for keeping up that frequency of publishing.
As for traffic… it’s still true for me that nothing spikes my numbers more than a Hacker News homepage hit (or a one-time Musk tweet, which was a bit weird!)
What I value more though is having writing I can link people to. I participate in so many conversations where I can say “I wrote more about this last year… URL”.
With blogging the thing that matters most isn’t how many people read your stuff, it’s who those people are. I’ve had so many great in-person conversations at networking events, or invitations to speak at conferences, or job offers (some of which I took) which stemmed from the right person reading something interesting on my blog.
You can juice those numbers by not being shy to send people a link to something you’ve written!
Oh yeah… this has been super useful for me at work – particularly in the job I’m at now: I’m working on a Bazel migration and I have so many articles I can refer to (I used to be in the Bazel team at Google, blogging about the internals of the tool) that it has kinda become a meme that I’ll reply with a blog post haha :)
Thanks for the detailed reply!
I started around 2004, I was around 15-16. I did a blog where I took a photo every day and wrote about it.
It lasted ten years until I got kind of bored doing it every day (and frankly, life got more boring).
Now I have site that’s been going for another 10 years but I post less frequently, a few times a month maybe.
My biggest regret is that I lost most/all of the old site and pictures because I didn’t know shit about websites or photos or backups etc back then. I kept switching between blog platforms because the grass was always greener, which compressed the images more and more until they were just the thumbnails. Then I ended up in a situation where I didn’t know how to export the posts, and it just got FUBAR. I really wish I’d known about SSGs etc back then, it would have been much simpler to have a local copy of my posts.
It’s a shame because it’s a period in time where I went from school, through to college (UK college), to university, met my now-wife, travelled a lot, started a regrettable career using computers etc etc.
Any chance you can revive some of your old content using the Internet Archive?
Here’s how I did that for some missing content from mine: https://simonwillison.net/2017/Oct/8/missing-content/
I might give that a go thanks! I’ve tried browsing it using the web interface but it’s never turned much up.
I did just notice that for a few years I was getting email notifications whenever I posted. I have those backed up so maybe I can export them somehow.
That’s sad and I’ve experienced something similar. I didn’t add many pictures to my posts from ~15-20 years ago, but I did add some, and it’s unfortunate that the copies I have are of very low resolution due to blog hosting shenanigans…
Yeah at the very least I wish I’d known to keep a local ‘original’ copy of everything but I just didn’t think about it back then
First of all, cheers 🍻
And to add to your list…Gmail launched only a couple months prior to your blog! I know this cause I’m writing a short post titled “20 Years of Gmail.”
The only common observation I have with your experiences is the move towards writing longer pieces which I think was the influence of twitter etc and it’s actually something I’m trying to reverse for my own blog: I’m trying to do less editing of blog posts and write shorter ones more frequently.
22 here too.
https://lproven.livejournal.com/
But now moved to:
https://lproven.dreamwidth.org/
… because LJ is Russian now, and yes, since it invaded Ukraine I very much do want the freedom to criticise the Russian government.
I still crosspost my blog https://dotat.at/@/ to https://fanf.dreamwidth.org/
Slightly surprisingly my link log https://dotat.at/:/ is older than my blog. I think back then I was still mostly on usenet; it took a few years for me to drift away.