I’ve always wanted to have a personal website where I could just write.
What would I write about though? Do I have anything interesting to say? What if there’s a mistake or I’m flat out wrong about something, I’ll look like a fool.
Even though I’ve had a list in my journal for roughly 10 years now called “blog post ideas” I still felt like I had nothing worthwhile.
Then I read this post by Simon Willison and thought that occasional posts about things I recently learned could be fun and interesting. I started thinking about it more seriously and had a revelation. It doesn’t have to be new, or cool, or fun, or revolutionary, as long as I get out of it what I want then that’s what matters. Right?
Well then I ran into my next conundrum. What actually am I trying to get out it? Do I want to write to teach people things? Of course, I do, but is that the entire purpose? No. Do I want to talk about my open source projects? Of course. Do I want to replace my personal journal with a public one? I think there’s merit to writing both. Writing in a personal journal which only belongs to you is important, and you write differently when you think no one else will see it. More emotion and raw feeling comes through, you include details that you might not want to share with everyone. Most people also won’t find much of your journal as interesting as you. When I look back at a journal entry from when I was a budding Jr Software Engineer I laugh and reminisce. I doubt anyone else would get the same chuckle reading about how I accidentally broke prod once, and we had to spend hours fixing it.
Or maybe you would.
Jack Rusher has a journal entry I really love, he calls it Homesteading.
This really resonates with me. Instead of living in these immaculate high-rise condominiums we call social media, run
entirely with the purpose of exploiting us for any/all data they can mine and sell for the sole purpose of increasing
shareholder value we can build our own ‘cabin of prose’. He describes the fulfilling process of building his cabin as
We felled our own timber, configured our own servers, wrote our own software, and carved our webpages out of wood using Stone Age tools–none of it was particularly easy or convenient. Unfortunately it is much
easier nowadays. Not that I wish the process were much more arduous; although I do enjoy doing things the hard way…
My cabin of prose is something more of a feeling than a process. The feeling of it in that manner is what appeals
to me.
It’s not a (blog|homepage|personal website). It’s a cabin; A shelter in a wild or remote area.
He finishes his journal entry with I don’t want to live in someone else’s house anymore and that encapsulates exactly
how I feel. Even though I haven’t had any social media presence for many years, I actually do enjoy sharing things
publicly from time to time. Just on my terms; on my land; and not in the metaverse.