Dave Winer has been blogging since 1994. And extensively too. His output is remarkable. And the result of that is nearly everything that he references and talks about from the past has a blog post he can link to. You can see his thinking in real time and get a great deal of context.
And it makes me want to both blog more freely and frequently and also live life more publicly online. And I think that there’s good arguments to be made for writing publicly on a weblog, rather than in offline software.
I’ve used the journaling app Day One for years. It’s been around for a while and now that it’s owned by Automattic I expect it will continue to be around for many years.
But generally speaking, software is more brittle than the web. It often uses proprietary formats and is prone to abandonment. Whereas the web is more open, easier to back up and won’t go away any time soon. In 50 years time I’d be shocked if a HTML/CSS webpage can’t still be shown the average computer still. I doubt Day One will still be around.
And in my 20 years of writing and journaling I’ve used many different software. The end result of that is my writing is all over the place, in different formats and different apps.
So what if that whole time I just used something like WordPress instead? Today my thoughts would all be in one place, nicely tagged1, easily searchable and with a URL that I could link to.
Then there’s the tricky subject of death. If I die today no one is accessing my journal. A journal that might be interesting to my family. But if my thoughts were on a blog they could see them easily.
Of course there’s privacy concerns with the web. WordPress does let you make posts private or hidden behind a password. But data breaches can happen and things can leak. So that is a downside.
But my whole point is that I want more of my thoughts and life to be public. If I’m honest I’m not one of those people who pours my heart out in my journal anyway.2 So 90% of what I write I’d happily make public and that’s my aim.
With clowes.blog I’m attempting to live a bit more publicly. But it still doesn’t come close to what Dave Winer’s scripting.com does. For me to get there I need to share and write more frequently.
So I’m going to try it. I think future me will be glad I did.
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I did my best to transfer my data from one service to another down the years. But one of the things that was always hardest to keep in the transfer were things like tags. If I used WordPress I would have had the same tag system from the start. ↩︎
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It’s actually one of the things I like least about my journaling style. I am always thinking of an audience when I journal. I know that no one other than me is going to read it, but yet I still can’t open up and share exactly what I’m feeling. ↩︎
