Link blogging, back to the web's origins

I’ve started this blog on 2023 and recovered a few posts that I had floating around in other webpages from before. Since then I’ve been slowly increasing my posting frequency.

Some times I find it hard to know what to write about. Other times I have a few ideas but I cannot get the energy to write about them immediately and then I forget. Some other times I learn or do something cool at work but I don’t know how to frame it for public posting and I end up not doing it.

As many say: writing is just a habit. The more one writes, the easier it becomes. Due to my job as a programmer I write issues, pull requests, comments and documentation daily. Those are easy for me to write.
Unfortunately public posting is different and I am not so used to it.

Lately I’ve found out Simon Willison’s approach to running a link blog:

In that article I proposed two categories of content that are low stakes and high value: things I learned and descriptions of my projects.

I realize now that link blogging deserves to be included a third category of low stakes, high value writing. We could think of that category as things I’ve found.

That’s the purpose of my link blog: it’s an ongoing log of things I’ve found—effectively a combination of public bookmarks and my own thoughts and commentary on why those things are interesting.

I liked this so much that I started doing it past week (I wrote about undoing deletes with Phoenix Liveview and how Excel represents dates and times). The main goal is for me to get more comfortable posting publicly. As I write more frequently I will get more used to it and it should become easier over time.

The side effect is that I will have a useful archive of things that I found useful or interesting that I own and can be indexed and searched by my future self or others. I usually share interesting things on X but I always have trouble finding them after some time. People that wants to read them must have an X account, and search is not great.

I agree with Simon that we should post more links to interesting things. Social network algorithms frequently penalize external links. The web was not like that at the begining, and with the advent of social networks we don’t own our content anymore.

It’s time to reject that and to own our content again!