articles/2025/November/why-blog.md

Why Do I Blog?

This blog post provides perspectives on why I blog.

Originally published to: https://deliverystack.net/2025/11/24/why-do-i-blog/

The image for this post shows decreasing traffic to my blog over time. Maybe my older content (mostly about C#, .NET, headless CMS, and enterprise orchestration engines) is less relevent now than it was even a year ago, but I think that another factor may be people using LLMs more and searching less.

This relates to a previous post about how and why I use social media:

https://deliverystack.net/2025/11/22/what-social-media-do-i-use-how-do-i-use-it-and-why/

About fifteen years ago, I started blogging about technology for a few main reasons:

I like to share knowledge and perspectives with others with hope that it could benefit them.
I benefit from feedback regarding my ideas.
My memory is terrible. It's often easier for me to find things on the internet or on my blog than in my own mind.
I was frequently answering the same questions repeatedly and it was easier to write a blog post and respond with a link than to answer each question each time.
If you post on the Internet, that host owns your content. You cannot control it; they can do whatever they want with your content, including deleting it. They can even lock you out of the system. When I put things on sites controlled by other individuals and organizations, those things would sometimes disappear. Since then, I have lost more than 10,000 forum posts, and migration of my blogs hosted on systems that I do not control have suffered various challenges such as changed URLs and broken links.
Using my blog, I don't have to conform to any policy to avoid censorship or be manipulated by any algorithm (excluding SEO and AI) to get my content to appear.

One thing I found from blogging is that people are relatively forgiving of typos, grammatical errors, and things like that in blog posts. Another is that relatively few readers interact with blog posts at all. I have one post with more than 100,000 views - from literally almost every country in the world - but only 140 comments and 16 likes.

I didn't realize it, but over time, my blog started bringing 25% to 50% of attributable traffic to the marketing site for the company where I worked. Due to the fact that this content was mostly relevant post-sale, I doubt that this drove any sales, so I don't know why people were clicking those links.

Now, I don't actually blog, and I don't monetize any content or market anything or anyone. I write markdown into files in a github project that I push to github. What appears as blog posts are actually early drafts of a repository of my writings, some of which I hope to shape into a book. I promote those blog posts on LinkedIn, which generates a bit more traffic than those posts would get solely from WordPress readers and Internet search engines. Again, my goal in driving traffic is to get feedback via comments, but this is relatively rare. I also see my traffic declining over time, so I wonder how LLMs use my content, or if the content that I have published and for which people search is just less relevant or even obsolete these days.

This allows me to edit my content locally in LibreOffice and VSCodium so that I can spend minimal time in the WordPress editor, which is absolutely one of the worst pieces of software ever written. Additionally, I have both local and hosted (github) archives of my work for when I eventually stop paying WordPress. The github repository is private, but I can share it with anyone that might be interested, and I have given my brother instructions for how to access it if something happens to me.

The main reasons why I write at all are for my children:

So that I can give them any advice and life lessons that could possibly benefit them based on my experiences.
So that they have a better reminder of me after I'm gone.

Additionally:

Writing, and especially blogging, is basically the only significant thing that I've done for at least the last 15 years. Without it, I probably wouldn't know what to do and seem to lose purpose.
I treat blogging as a form of journaling, which is a healthy activity, especially relative to doomscrolling or letting the algorithms otherwise control me.