When I first stated writing online, I didn’t even know what a blog was. I set up some online hosting, and cobbled together an HTML website from a theme, and then when I posted something I would duplicate a page and link it up on the man index, all manually. No research done, no WordPress, I had no clue. All I knew was that I wanted to publish online and be a writer, and it wasn’t until 2013 that I really sorted myself out and began to publish properly.
Due to this desire, I wrote about my thoughts about technology on my blog and then posted the links to Facebook and Twitter. I am so glad that I went this way and have almost all of my posts as a record instead of pouring all of my time into social media. Although I have no idea what started this motivation, the last few weeks have proven that more and more people should be doing the same and putting some value into the things they put on the internet.
In this time of turmoil and possible migration, don’t just fall into the same trap and do the same with Mastodon, or wherever you end up. There are some great services out there now that can provide you with a cost-effective way to turn your would be tweet storms into blog posts to make them yours, forever. I am a little bias towards micro.blog because, although not perfect, it offers you a great way to get started and start posting everything to one place.
My true hope with all this Twitter nonsense is that people start moving away from social media apart from for real communication, and that more thangs get published online. Blogging isn’t about putting 300+ words together in a nice little package and choosing the right images to go along with it. It can be anything you want it to be, your blog and your posts are your own and don’t need to conform to anyone else’s rules.
You will hear many blog supporters discuss ownership, the indieweb and even internet standards when getting preachy about having a blog. None of these really matter to most people, the real reason you need a blog is to showcase you. To have your little place online that isn’t affected by algorithms and billionaire babies. It’s just yours.