Robert Birming in a relatable post, The world’s worst blogger:

“I moved my blog from Bear to Micro.blog because, as I put it, it “started to feel limited…”

“…So I moved here. A place with great features for adding photo collections, logging books, writing both long posts and short ones without titles.”

“Now that I have all these possibilities, I can’t seem to do it. No matter how I try, it never feels right to mix things up. And when I tried running two blogs on the same platform, it just got confusing.”

I used to feel this way about my blog. I came to Micro.blog from a static blog that was hosted on GitLab I maintained for a couple of years. Back then, it was 90% tech-related long posts with footnotes and references. When I moved to Micro.blog, I started to struggle.

At first, I wrote long posts like I used to on the old blog, but writing like that is time-consuming and felt like a chore at times. I became a bit jealous of other folks on the Micro.blog’s Discover channel, who posted interesting photos or quick quotes from other places online. At the same time, Micro.blog was offering podcasts, so I tried that out and got overwhelmed quickly. It felt like I lost my way. I was an Emacs-dedicated tech person who writes about Emacs, and now I was venting about meaningless things.

I’m not sure exactly when (if there was such a quick transition at all), but I started enjoying posting photos on Micro.blog. I always liked taking photos, and Micro.blog gave me an opportunity to “just post stuff.” It was easy to do since I had a dedicated photos section (which comes with Micro.blog by default), so it didn’t feel like “cheating” when I wrote long posts on the main blog section.

The other thing that started changing for me was the integration of Mastodon and Micro.blog. I was active on Mastodon before I went “all in” with the blog. This made it easier to tell myself that I’m just posting short “mind farts” (as I used to call those short out-of-place posts) on Mastodon and using my blog as an archive for those. With time, and also after reading Manton’s book about microblogging, I started to switch gears and make my blog the main source of those quick posts. Having an official name for those quick posts - microblogging - helped me to “allow” myself to write short posts.

Other things followed up. With Micro.blog as my online home for blog posts, photos, and short descriptions of walks and meals I had, it was easy to start talking about movies I had enjoyed watching. Again, Micro.blog made things easy. I could review my movies on a site meant for that (letterboxd) and my review would appear automatically on my blog, and even get a dedicated feed. I was further inspired by Chris Campbell after one of Micro.blog’s Micro camps. Now I can say that the reviews themselves add an incentive to watch interesting movies.

Video games, another activity I spend a lot of time on, followed suit naturally with backlogged, where I try (and fail) to keep up with all the games I play. Just like Letterboxd, the RSS from my reviews there feeds automatically to my blog and gets published there without me needing to post anything to Micro.blog directly.

After I switched themes to Tiny Theme, which comes with quick “micro hooks” to add stuff like a static introduction to a page, I included my old blog and wiki in my About and Archive & Search sections because it made sense to fit those there. Now I’m considering explaining how I’ve done some of these things in my wiki again for other people who want to follow suit, which might become yet another section.

But I feel like I still haven’t answered Robert’s original issue, that “mixing paralysis” he describes. Kimberly KG chimed in at some point in the conversation (as a comment) and explained that it’s hard to get down and personal sometimes, which is what a blog is all about (Is it? I guess it depends who you ask), and this is yet another big topic.

If I was writing for profit or for some sort of a goal, I’d say focus is important and “content delivery” is important, because that’s how you get more subscribers and more traffic and more… more. But this is not why I write.

I still struggle to write some of my more personal posts (who doesn’t?), but I try and push through. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen more often than it used to. I think that’s one of my personal victories, to be able to tell the world my personal stories.

Most people who follow my blog are techies and Emacs/Linux people, and that’s fine, but I tell myself that every now and then, there’s someone out there who stumbled into my blog and reads something personal that hits home. I know this is the case because I sometimes receive personal emails from these readers. I feel that when I write these things, I write them for myself and for them. I love creating those connections. And it doesn’t just happen through my posts. I write to people who make themselves vulnerable and write about their personal lives from my blog’s email address. They always respond in kind, and we can sometimes start a heart-to-heart talk as if we’ve known each other for years.

This means so much to me. This is what the small web, the personal web, is all about. And it will always be small, it will always be just a small group of people at a time, one reader or two, who reach out about one of the weirder posts, the one you didn’t think much about when you wrote it. It’s hard to describe how good it feels to get a personal email from someone.

So if there’s one reason to justify writing short posts and personal posts, you know, one of those “why am I writing about this” kind of posts, it is this. And Micro.blog is definitely a good place for that.