The most beautiful thing about a blog is that most of us don’t write blogs to become famous or make money. We write blogs simply because we are enthusiasts and nerds and hobbyists, and our little home in this vague corner of the internet is where we go to be, in a sense, fully ourselves, a safe place where we can go full nerd with a community of fellow nerds in tow.

I wholeheartedly agree!

People living halfway across the world from us, in Belgium and Iceland and the very far ends of Vladivostock, were making things they wanted to make just for the heck of it — websites and blogs were born out of hobbies, not ambitions. We were all amateurs making crude, ugly but heartfelt internet objects out of our laughable HTML skills. It was FUN because we were all amateurs together and there were no rules and no expectations and, of course, very little aesthetic sense. It was a pretty level playing ground.

Interesting enough, I feel that I am at this stage with this online journal. Except I'm not living in the past, but in the present.

I’m done offering a stupid newsletter...

I’m done offering free ebooks as incentives to signup...

I’m done creating courses that I have to spend hours creating only to discover that no one is signing up because I don’t get enough traffic.

I’m done sharing my writing five times a day on several different social media sites...

Damn! Dan must have been really fired up when he wrote this. To clarify, he is railing against what he calls the traditional model of blogging. I don't think he is railing against blogging in general, or writing on the web for that matter.

For the start of 2020, I wanted to add another pinned page to this site, but I noticed that the existing pinned pages were already starting to crowd the navbar. So I wanted to unpin some of the pages to make way for a new one. I've decided to unpin two pages... for now.

Unpinned the Bookmarks Page

The original intent of the Bookmarks page was to save bookmarks for myself, while at the same time making the links available to others. Lately, I've noticed that I've stopped updating this page with new links, and instead opted to write new posts where I talk a little bit about the content of the article that I'm sharing, while at the same time sharing the link to said article. With the use of a “Bookmarks” hashtag on those posts, I feel like that is a better way to save and share bookmarks as there is some context as to why I thought a certain article/post was interesting in the first place.

Link: Please for the love of Blarg, Start a Blog

Move to your own little island archipelago on the internet. What Warren Ellis coined as “The Isles of Blogging”. Each blog “a little radio station broadcasting though the night” ... Early 2018 being the start of the Archipelago (re)settlement in my mind. The seas of social media have risen around us. So blogs, what once were the mountain tops of internet culture have become little Islands.

I love this analogy of blogging in today's age where social media dominates the internet.

So when I started this experiment, I wanted to see what would happen if I disable the ability for me to view this site's stats. The result, a much better online writing experience. Not being influenced by the number of readers I get, allows me to simply not worry about it. It makes it easier to just write about something I want to write about. It makes it easier to write for myself.

As a related update to the results from Experiment Log – 001, I found that the number of readers did not increase in the 2nd half of that experiment. It stayed low when my posts were not being listed in the Read.Write.As feed. As I stated in the results for that experiment though, I no longer care about that.

It's been almost one month since I started this experiment. I've decided to end it at the start of a new month, just because I didn't see any benefit to prolonging it. I started this experiment with the intention of answering the questions below. And so here are the answers.

I want to see if not publishing to the Read Write.As feed will decrease the number of people reading my posts.

So this was interesting because during the start of this experiment, I still had access to my site's stats. However, a little over a week after starting this experiment, I started Experiment Log – 003, which basically hid my site's stats.

That “something else” might be something similar to the Hawthorne's. Of course it might not be on that intimate of a level, but to have another individual read our entries and build a joint narrative alongside us – a vision of writing on the web as writing in a shared journal.

I think CJ Eller in this post touched upon something that I didn't know was at the back of my mind; part of me wants my close friends to also be writing journals or writing on their own blogs.

Back when I was in high school, it was me and a couple of friends who were always playing around with computers and consequently the internet. We had our own Archmage guild. We tried to find ways to end up in the same kingdom when playing Utopia. We spent countless nights hanging out on mIRC channels. We had customized Friendster profiles. We had our own blogs. We basically followed each other online, just like close friends do.

Dino Bansigan is concerned about writing “more for myself and less to an audience” but I find myself wondering why those must be seen as mutually exclusive. Is it not possible to write for oneself yet to an audience?

Bix asked a good question that I don't have an answer to.

For some reason, I cannot wrap my head around the concept of writing for myself, but at the same time writing to an audience. I feel like if I can just look at it from a different angle though, I would figure it out. The closest thing I can think of, is writing for myself but writing in such a way that the content is palatable to readers. But then, wouldn't I be writing to an audience?