Not much to this, I just really think we need more people starting up blogs. There’s a lot of merit to starting a blog just for your own enjoyment, that’s why I started this blog, but I think there’s more of a global community of knowledge purpose behind starting a blog. There’s been a lot of times where I’m working on some project of mine, and I run into what I think is a pretty niche problem. Oftentimes, I’ll come through Reddit and Stack Overflow threads, maybe even give AI a try if I’m particularly stuck, but the main place I find real, valuable help, is when I find a blog post that perfectly understands how to solve the problem I’m facing. More than that, it’s exciting each time I find one of these blog posts, because I get to see a new website that has it’s own original sense of style.
It’d be amazing if every time that someone ran into an issue with something they were working on, they just wrote a publicly accessible blog post on how they went about fixing it. To me, it’s a pretty natural extension of the common mantra in the software development world, “Build in public”. If everyone contributed their little workarounds and successes, it’d make it much easier for everyone else to get around those same problems.
Even from a non engineering perspective, sharing things like art and experiences, could offer up examples for others who want to learn a new skill, or get inspired. Additionally, blogs can be a route for feedback, posting your work publicly gives people a chance to share their thoughts, given you enable comments (maybe I should do that on this blog after all). If you especially connect with another blogger, you can reach out and form connections with someone you might not otherwise have ever met.
I know in the age of AI, that posting your creations online might seem somewhat scary. You don’t want AI to scrape your art and use it against your will. However, I believe that blogs offer a solution to this problem, by taking content out of consolidated sources, it becomes harder for companies to find your content. Additionally, it gives you explicit control over what can be done with your content, since you alone are the owner.
Even if you have no tech background, I think it’s worth looking into building your own personal space on the internet. Many companies offer quick and easy ways of setting up a blog, and there is lots of open source frameworks that make the process quite simple even without a web development background. Just be careful who owns your blog if you pick out an all in one service, after all putting your work in the hands of some other company goes against the very nature of a “personal” space on the internet. That being said, I’d hate to put rules on how others can blog. If you find a way of blogging that suits your workflow, just start blogging.