For years, spending time on social media was an investment that paid dividends. One of my UN jobs was connected directly with responding to a tweet about them looking for an archivisit. Within a day I had an interview and within a few days I was working. That was back in 2014 or so, when social media was more convivial....
Posts tagged “blogging”
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On Investing Time Writing a Daily Blog Post daily — Apr 17, 2026 -
A Simpler Wordpress Federation Process — Mar 27, 2026Yesterday I spent some time looking into why my WordPress blog was de-federated. My suspicion is that when I switched from FTP to rsync, to upload the latest changes, it modified the .htaaccess file or the .well-known/webfinger file. That’s why my blog stopped posting to the Fediverse....
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Twitter Threads and Blogging — Sep 16, 2019Twitter threads and blogging are both free but whereas with one you need to click to read the continuation and it’s hard to print the other is self contained and easily shareable.... -
To Blog Or To Newsletter, That Is The Question — Apr 15, 2023With the sudden growth of audiences for newsletter writers on sub stacks as they start to use Notes so the question emerges on whether to dump blogging, for news lettering. In theory by news lettering on Substack we grow an audience that is pre-packaged and ready to go.... -
The Social Media Reflex — Aug 27, 2019This morning I uninstalled Facebook and Twitter because most of the tweets I saw were people complaining about things or posts that would fit perfectly as blog posts on a website. We have moved towards the Social Media reflex, rather than towards an open sharing habit.... -
The Futility of Blogging — Apr 9, 2023I have been writing blog posts every single day for one hundred and fourty five days and rather than feel more inspired, and get a big audience, I am writing for an audience of one. Some days I am filled with inspiration and I write the blog post in twenty minutes or less. Other days it takes me an hour or two. It’s hard to write every day because some days are interesting, so there is something to talk about, and other days are dull.... -
The Facebook Monopoly — Jun 29, 2017I am tired of the Facebook monopoly. While Google gets fined for helping people shop websites like Facebook do the opposite. Instead of increasing the diversity of content on the web and the sharing of ideas it has helped create silos of like minded people. Likeminded people is a polite way of saying brainwashed in the case where opinions are based on opinions rather than facts....
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Reading The Cult of the Amateur By Andrew Keen in 2023 — Jan 22, 2023During yesterday’s walk I found that I could read The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen as an audiobook so I listened to a few minutes. It took me back in time to 2006 when people worried about the detrimental effect that bloggers that were not accountable would have on information, disinformation, reliability and accountability. At the time people worried that bloggers and certain social networks would spread inaccurate information and manipulate people.... -
Planning A New Section For My Website. — Jun 25, 2007Today I’ve spent time looking at the website earnings and I’ve seen that with just a few minutes of work I’ve doubled the earnings from my website. I’m not going into the details at the moment but since I seem to be doing nothing productive I’m going to re-work my website to increase my earnings. Four hundred and sixty visitors passthrough this website with about a million six hundred hits of which most visitors, through search engines get straight to the page they want. What I need to do over the next few days is making sure that there is advertising on most of the pages. in so doing I increase the opportunity for people to click through and find more relevant content on someone else’s web page. I need to write more articles, rather than blog posts. Blog posts are a lazy method of web mastering because they require no real effort. Find an idea, write about it, post it. At least when you create a page you think about the content. I’ll start by writing a section about a variety of podcasts I’ve enjoyed over the past two years and hope that what I write will be appreciated by others. Through this process I will be targeting a specific audience, trying to create relevant content and as a result get more visitors. When working on the Roman section of this website I ran out of knowledge, therefore, the speed at which I added content plummeted. There is one page that I’m proud of from the time. It’s the one on Slavery. I spent several hours doing research, writing notes, and then uploading this page to the website. As a result of the quality of content universities and a number of other reputable websites linked to my own. That’s what I plan to do with the new sections I will add on podcasts I enjoy listening to and why. It’s going to take a few days to generate this new section but since I’m between studies and work it’s one way of attempting to get a small secondary income. We’ll see how it goes....
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One Hundred And One Blog Posts in One Hundred and One Days — Feb 24, 2023I have written at least one hundred and one blog posts in one hundred and one days. During this time most blogs have gone by unread. Blogging could be seen as futile but it isn’t. Having the discipline to write every single day, despite having no inspiration is good. It forces us to stop, think, and develop inexistent ideas.... -
One Hundred and Eighty Two Days of Blogging in a Row — May 16, 2023With the decline in the value of social media so the value of blogging has come back up. By blogging, rather than using social media, for at least an hour or two I am forcing myself to think, and to elaborate on ideas that would otherwise go without conclusion. Having a thought that is shared in 140 characters is easy. Having a thought that is three hundred words long is not.... -
Of Twitter Threads (mice) and Blog Posts (Humans). — Feb 20, 2020With the sentence “Of Twitter threads (Mice) and Blog Posts (Humans)” you’ll see that I’ve done two things. The first is that I’ve modernised a well-known book title to draw parallels with the practices of writing Twitter threads and blog posts....
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Of Blogging and Substacking — Jun 4, 2023A month or two ago we had the chance to jump on the Substack wagon while it was hot and to ride the wave of new followers and experience a growing community. I could have joined in. I could have become one of those “I’m one of you people” but I didn’t.... -
Is twitter changing your blogging habits? — Oct 28, 2008is twitter changing your blogging habits? (original post) Yes and no. Twitter is replacing instant messaging and chatrooms. It’s an open method by which for people to communicate instantly with others. It’s also about the overheard conversation although that term has dissapeared. What does "overheard" mean? Well simply that whenever two people discuss a topic hundreds of people are following this conversation and when they decide they have an opinion they can cut in. They do have that 140 character limit though, so they need to get to the point is efficiently as possible. When that isn’t possible then they can do the next best thing. Write a comment in a blog post or even write a blog entry of their own where the conversation that took place on twitter is synthesised into a more digestible chunk of information. As a result twitter is changing people’s habits but the question is why people want to chat publicly rather than in an enclosed space. Today people like transparency....
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Blogging One Hundred And Fifty-Two Days In A Row — Nov 14, 2021Blogging one hundred and fifty-two days in a row is an interesting challenge. It encourages you to think of something daily, for months in a row. It also forces you to have the discipline to sit and attempt to write for one or two hours a day, whether inspiration is there or not. Often it isn’t. Add to this that most blog posts get zero views and you have a reason to stop and give up.... -
Blogging And Digital Minimalism — Mar 6, 2020Blogging and Digital Minimalism are related. Blogging is about finding a topic and focusing on it for an extended period of time. Social media has shifted from being a conversation between individuals to one where personalities broadcast, and their audience is ignored....
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Avoiding User Generated Content With Adverts — Feb 5, 2020Instagram has become user-generated content with adverts every fifth post. We went from following friends and their life to following personalities within our field of passions. I follow climbers, photographers, and friends. By following strangers, the timeline has become less relevant. This is especially true about following influencers.... -
11 years of Wordpress Blogging — Jul 27, 2017As serendipity would have it I have been a wordpress blogger for at least 11 years. As I was looking through notifications on worpdress.com I came across the notification below yesterday. As I searched for ideas for blog posts for today I came across an e-mail. [caption id=“attachment_3709” align=“aligncenter”] 10 years of Wordpress [caption id=“attachment_3710” align=“aligncenter”] 11 years of Wordpress On this day, eleven years ago I set up this blog. Since then I have written about one thousand two hundred posts, tens of thousands of tweets and many many facebook messages. I mention this because blogging and social media are two different challenges. With blogging you spend the day thinking about a topic. You’re searching for something that you can write about for 300 or more words. Compared to nanowrimo where you try to have an average of 1666 words per day this is easy, until you add the public dimension. Writing for the world wide web is different to writing for yourself, with the knowledge that you will go back and edit it, eventually, if ever. Writing for twitter and facebook is easy. Twitter is a conversation so the more you socialise with other people the more dynamic your posting can be. The same is true of facebook except that facebook is a “silo” of people you vet and trust. Twitter is in essence a chatroom. A blog post is more time consuming. I like to write about technology and about the adventures I have. That’s when inspiration is easier. Imagine for an instant that Wordpress.com was more popular than Facebook or twitter. Imagine for a moment that people decided that instead of spending a few seconds per update they spent half an hour to an hour per post. Imagine that people read long form posts rather than short updates. Imagine that we go back to a blogging social media landscape where people write reflective posts. Imagine that we read rather than skim. The beauty of the long form, of writing blog posts is that we create content that people search for and read. Emotion is involved, but so is thought. Through blogging we generate an income for our content. More people should blog, and more people should share their posts.... -
WordPress, AI, and the Human Niche — Mar 14, 2026Every day I spend one to two hours thinking about what to write for my blog. Yesterday I noticed that Wordpress wants to get AI to draft the first version of posts using the AI model of our choice, as long as it’s American, and take away the hours of blank page syndrome.... -
Learning by Blogging — May 15, 2024A few days ago I was asked once again why I wore two watches and I gave the usual answer of “this is my GPS watch and that is my Smartwatch”. People still fail to understand so I elaborate and that’s where I saw that blogging is useful.... -
Blogging for Three Hundred and Sixty Six Days in a Row — Nov 16, 2023For three hundred and sixty six days I have written a blog post daily. In some cases I wrote two posts, and scheduled the post to appear the next day. This is when I was driving for thirteen hours, or if I knew that my morning was busy. In the process I have definitely given myself a writing habit. The question I ask myself now is whether to continue, or whether to change the posting frequency.... -
NaNoWriMo and Blogging — Nov 10, 2023November is the month when a group of people try to write 1667 words per day for a month. they have write-in events, word sprints and many other gimmicks to encourage them to break the challenge into less daunting challenges. I didn’t even consider participating this year for a simple reason. This is my 360th day in a row of writing a daily blog post.... -
One Hundred and One Posts with Hugo — Oct 14, 2023I was using Day One to blog but I found the process slow and clunky. I then switched to writing blog posts with VIM and that sped me up by a lot. I then switched to Hugo and VIM. Now I use VS Code with Front Matter to generate the pages, and then wrote plenty of posts using VIM. Now I’m still using FrontMatter CMS but with VS Code without touching VIM....
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Blogging with VS Code and Hugo — Sep 23, 2023Yesterday I had no inspiration. In the end I did write about something but only after hours of staring at a hypothetical blank page. When I did start writing I used Frontmatter to generate the page but I forgot to open terminal and write the blog post using VIM. I used VSCode and Markdown. Whilst this might sound ordinary to most I did this because I like writing blog posts with VIM as it gets me to learn, over time, how to use it, automatically, rather than by struggling.... -
Blogging and Medium — Aug 16, 2023During the early days of the pandemic I wrote for at least one days every day. I was blogging the pandemic experience from my point of view. More recently I have kept up another blogging streak. This time I am reaching day 274 as I write this blog post....
