Why do I write on this blog?

Context:

Today, a quick post outside of the usual homelab or home automation articles, to answer a simple question: “Why do I write on this blog?”. You may ask why I even write this “why” blog post… But that comes from messages and articles I’ve found on mastodon or in my RSS feed reader :).

I followed a link on mastodon that sent me to Kev Quirk’s «Why I Have A Blog» post and thus discover the «Ask HN: Why don’t you have a blog?» Hacker News thread about it (the TLDR; is on this blog post by Jan-Lukas Else).

I found some interesting responses and reasons for not having a blog. Funny enough, I had that exact conversation with 2 different IRL friends last week… So I thought I should write quickly the reasons I manage this blog over the years (with some long period without post or even period where this blog was offline…).

Ok, so why do I have a blog?

The TLDR; is: for me, myself and I.

Many people write blog posts for other: to advertised themselves (like a online resume), to be “known”, for money or any good or bad reasons. Let me be 100% clear here, I’m not judging or debating any reasons because

1. who am I to judge? and 2. I believe in a very minimalist ethic/moral

so everybody can do and think whatever they want as long as they don’t harm other. I just want to explain why I write mine:

1. It forces me to think and define solution better than just hacking stuff on my own, I feel like if I want to explain in a blog post what I have been doing on a specific topic, I should at least make sure I understand what I’m saying…
2. I’m dumb (the only thing that I know is that I know nothing¹), so it forces me to test things I write (as opposed to stop when it start working by chance^^)
3. I have a very selective memory, and writing makes it easier for me to remember
4. I like writing (this is true and false depending on the time of day :D)
5. It is my tiny place on the big internet. I own it, it’s running on my raspberry pi docker swarm cluster that I can look at physically. If I want, I can stop it, but noone can do it for me (except my ISP can block my internet connection in theory… and even so, the blog would still run for me on my network, so I won’t loose a thing).
6. It helps me write in English, which is for me a way to tray to improve my writing English skills as well… This one in the end is not that true as I don’t have reviewers or spellcheckers :D.

My personal believe is that writing here helps me… And that is already good enough :) I could have an offline blog but I publish it just so it might help other (even helping 1 person is good enough to have it public). And I’m very happy if that happens, but don’t care if not. And to enforce myself to follow this philosophy, I don’t:

• Track visitors (no analytics, JS or based on logs): By doing so, I do not know if an article is read more than others or even if they are read by anyone at all. This prevent me from what I call the “narcissist trap” of our modern era where some people just want to be known and “validated” by others (main reasons Instagram and alike are so famous). I understand why (IMHO, a Human flow that we all have) but I want to preserve myself a bit from that²…
• Advertise this blog: I only post 1 message on Mastodon per blog post. I don’t boost them after some time, post them on Reddit, Hacker News or Lobste.rs, where I would get more readers by “targeting” the right audience. If one day I see a post from me posted there by someone else, I will be very happy, don’t get me wrong :) But I don’t want the purpose of this small blog to be “work” for me, just the fun of writing some things I’m doing.
• Have a comment system: This might change, but for now I don’t have a comment system. If people want to contact me, the contact page is there for that. I’m happy to receive comments on Mastodon or via email but I don’t put in a place a comment system. I might at some point think about ActivityPub or Indie Web integration, but it is not planned yet. For me, this is both a good and a bad thing, but I avoid a lot of the internet hate as well as managing spams…

Conclusion

Do whatever you like, but I often suggest friends who want to learn new things to write about it, even in an offline tool. It will help for sure, and someday you might even want to show it to the world…

So my TLDR; is YUNOBLOG ? :)

/[TLDR]: Too Long, Don’t Read /[IMHO]: In My Humble Opinion