I have not forgotten about this blog, even though I haven’t been posting here as much as I had anticipated.
I think one of my challenges has been the thought of who is this blog for? What am I even doing here?
I have a lot of varied interests, from hiking and photography, to foster care, to all kinds of technical topics, and business, and then there’s my musings on politics and faith. (which have evolved and will continue to change over time) Then there are the house projects I could post about, or the backyard chickens, and the bees.
None of this is a problem on Twitter where I have intentionally kept my Twitter locked down, and every tweet feels ephemeral. Here today, gone tomorrow. Nor is this a problem on Instagram where most of my posts are just neat pictures.
But writing a blog has felt a lot more permanent. And if I give you a mixed feed ranging from interesting tidbits I’ve found about the Linux kernel in one post, another post about my thoughts on all the posts about deconstructing the Christian faith in the next, and then a solar update in the next, who honestly gives a shit?
Maybe no one. And you know what, I don’t have any metrics on this blog for how many people are out there reading this. Unlike Twitter, I don’t have a follower count that I can watch tick down as people find the posts I make uninteresting. And that’s a good thing. I think social media has trained us, or at least it has trained me to be too performative. I don’t want to be a tap dancing monkey.
And the blogs I’ve enjoyed reading most have been the ones of people. Real people. Talking about their real lives. Whether they get absurdly interested in running a text-only OpenBSD laptop, or talking about taking their kids down to the beach for one last summer trip, or their rain-water collection system.
Because behind these posts are real people. And real people are really interesting, even if I’m not as interested in each topic.
So, if anyone is out there reading this, I’m changing my perspective a bit. I’m going to post things I find interesting. Maybe you find everything I post as interesting as I do (unlikely), and probably half these things I will lose interest in or change my mind about in the years to come, but this is who I am. A real person. A changing person. Hopefully it inspires you to do the same on your own blog. Because those are the posts that I really love.