tech-rants

On Blogging Platforms

Published

October 10, 2024

11 min read

a dibble dabble on blogging platforms

Setting up a blog and jotting down your opinions for the world to read, share and contemplate about is really easy this day’s. With a plethora of blogging platforms available online like WordPress, Substack, Ghost, dev.to, hash node, blogger, Tumblr and many more. Here i will try to paint why you don’t need to rely on third party blogging platforms, why you should rely on them, the good and the bad and all that jazz

Writing is like exercise
Brief History of Blogging
Blogging Platforms
Final Thoughts

Writing is like exercise

people who write vs people who read meme

A regular writing habit is just like a regular exercise habit for your brain. Yes, it takes time, energy, and money, but it’s also good for you, and well worth it. Writing and especially publishing it is just like going to the gym for your brain.

In the book Novelist as a Vocation, Haruki Murakami prefers writing to running; he lays great stress on continuity and mental endurance. He treats writing like an activity: exercising over time, much like the muscular system. Which at first is a hard thing in all honesty but like everyone that hits the gym for the first time it will be hard but with consistency and discipline you will see the improvements and benefits over time.

For Cameron, writing-as she says in The Artist’s Way-is a form of mental gymnastics, especially for the practice of morning pages, or daily writing with no objective other than to write about practically anything that comes to mind. She believes this clears mental clutter, strengthens creativity, and builds discipline much the same way regular physical exercise will strengthen the body. To her, writing is like a daily practice-one that improves with consistency and effort. There are tons of research claiming writing is good for your mental and physical health but I am not going to open that can of worms, I will leave links so you can dig down that rabbit hole for yourself.

Papers

Brief History of Blogging

It all starts in late 1990s with a guy called Jorn Barger, with a beard that seems to have inspired Rick Rubin. Jorn was a certified computer nerd messing around with Minivac 601 since he was eleven years old, he studied math and sciences in high-school but never got a degree. Then as all the revolutionary people do he went out on a self discovery journey at The Farm with the hippies in Tennessee. Around 1989 he took a job at Northwestern University as an artificial intelligence researcher. As any computer geek he spent time stuck to his screen and online forums, he used to hang around at a platform called Usenet, Jorn’s credited with over ten thousand posts. He helped write some of the earliest FAQs on things like ASCII art and was active in forums on topics as diverse as AI, singer Kate Bush, and writer James Joyce. He was well-known and, to all appearances, well-liked for his first few years in the community. By 1992 due to some issues at work and on Usenet he was no longer employed at Northwestern University and banned from the forum. Fast-forward Jorn created a page that linked to other posts and pages, some on Robot Wisdom, some elsewhere. Every time he posted something new, it would appear at the top of the page, and everything else would move down a little. By scrolling down, you moved back in time. He started posting from 1995 and continued to post for an entire decade and in that time Robot Wisdom changed the way the world communicated. The whole process of collecting interesting things from around the world and writing about them on the internet was a new idea, and so it needed a new name. Jorn decided to call it “logging the web”, which made Robot Wisdom, of course, the first weblog. So it became Robot Wisdom Weblog, and the blogosphere was born on December 17, 1997. More History

Fast-forwarding to 1999 which marked the launch of blogger which allowed users to create blogs easily, paving the way for more people to share their thoughts online. The earliest blogs resembled personal diaries they featured simple text layouts with minimal graphics, which were often hosted on free platforms allowing individuals to express their views and share experiences. One of the first known blogs was links.net which was started by Dave winer which focused on technology and personal commentary (reminds me of this popular blog called Cup of tea).

In the early 2000s blogging saw a huge surge due platforms like WordPress which provided more customization and functionality, then blogs began to shifts from personal journals to new sources and professional platforms, influencing media and public discourse. Blogging tacked onto the “long tail” theory, where niche interests find their audiences online, thus allowing a proliferation of specialized blogs on everything from cooking to reviews of technology.

More Interesting Stuff

On Blogging Platforms

This day’s there are tons of blogging platforms depending on what kind of blogging you want to do, the most main stream platforms are microblogging ones. Microblogging is a form of blogging in which the central role or idea of communication is represented by short, frequent updates rather than longer, whole pieces of information. Updates typically involve textual information, images, links, videos, or other media that are quickly published and exchanged in large volumes. Posts are typically succinct and character-limited in nature, thus making them fitting for hasty communication. Popular microblogging platforms include x(twitter), Tumblr, threads, mastodon. While traditional blogs use platforms like WordPress, substack, blogger, Wix … and so on. But why should you consider using a blogging platform instead of setting up one yourself ? With a plethora of blogging platforms out there, anyone can set up a blog with a few click in minutes and get on with what every they wanted to say, making it easier to focus on the content creation, while this has its own benefits it also comes with its downsides. Let’s talk about the benefits of using blogging platforms for a bit.

The main reason is ease of use, most platforms offer user-friendly interfaces, allowing you to create and publish content without needing technical knowledge and the pre-designed templates simplify the process.

Many blogging platforms are free or have affordable pricing plans. For example, WordPress.com, Blogger, and Medium provide free hosting, while paid versions offer additional features, and include built-in SEO tools to make it easier to optimize your content for search engines, which increases your chances of ranking higher on Google and attracting organic traffic. Some platforms (e.g., WordPress.org or Substack) provide ways to monetize content, such as through ads, affiliate marketing, or subscription models. They also offer integrated commenting systems and social sharing features, helping to foster a community around your blog. These benefits make blogging platforms a great starting point for anyone looking to start blogging.

While having multiple benefits, there platforms do have their own downsides as well, one of the major ones being lack of ownership, you don’t have full control over your content. The platform technically owns it, and they may have the right to remove or control it under certain circumstances. Hosting your blog on a platform means you’re reliant on their terms of service, which may change or become restrictive over time & honestly when is the last time you ever sat down and read the EULA, terms of service. (current word press drama : techcrunch, the verge)

If you decide to switch platforms later, migrating your content can be complicated. Certain platforms may make it difficult to export your posts, or you could lose certain features in the process. Advertisements are also another issue you would have to deal with since free blogging platforms often display their own ads on your blog, which you have no control over, and you won’t earn revenue from those ads unless you upgrade to a paid plan.

On the other hand, some content is geo-restricted or censored based on one’s geographical location; readers of certain countries cannot access your blog without a VPN. This may be because of some government-imposed regulations on them, or sometimes even the platform itself decides to block content in certain regions because of the local law or policy against such topics. For example, topics that are politically sensitive. While these also ask readers to make an account or log in to read complete articles, this discourages casual readers who don’t want to sign up or be tracked. Forcing users to log in restricts your audience to only the most motivated that will go the extra step, which reduces engagement and readership. In addition, content policies which keep you restricted on what to publish. For example, they might censor sensitive or controversial topics, political opinions. The algorithm that serves readers their daily dose of blogs can also be against you. If your content isn’t to the liking of the algorithm or popular topics, it may not be seen even if it’s published.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion my best bet would be if you don’t want to go through the hassle of setting up your own blog, managing it and what not then use a blogging platform. Setting up a blog for yourself is so simple this day’s thanks to GitHub pages that most people are using it, even this blog is set up from a Jekyll template and hosted on GitHub, while still this might be affected by geo-restriction if GitHub for some reason is blocked in some spaces, but the benefits in this sense are I have full ownership of my content whereas I can take it off GitHub whenever I want and host it somewhere else, I am not forced to comply to some guidelines and terms of service which is offered to me by a platform & because I am using a Jekyll theme which generates static sites out of markdown content I can say I own what I write, as of now GitHub pages do not have ads on their sites which makes is a breeze. So, so far this is my view on blogging and blogging platforms, it all boils down to preference you might prefer microblogging instead of traditional blogging and what not, don’t hesitate to share your views and opinions as always, see you next time.

Writing is like exercise

Papers

Brief History of Blogging

More Interesting Stuff

On Blogging Platforms

Final Thoughts

Some more interesting stuff