In praise of the personal blog

Every few years someone declares the blog dead. First it was social media, then newsletters, then short-form video. And yet here we are: personal blogs are still around, quietly doing what they've always done.

Ownership

When you publish on someone else's platform, you're a tenant. The landlord can change the rules, redesign your living room, or evict you entirely. A personal blog — on your own domain, with files you control — is ownership. It's a small thing, but it changes how you write: you write for the long term, not for the feed.

Slowness as a feature

A blog post doesn't need to perform in the first hour. There's no trending tab to climb. That removes a whole category of pressure and replaces it with a better question: is this worth saying?

Some of my favorite essays on the internet are years old and still perfectly readable, because nobody moved them behind a login wall or deleted the platform.

The compound interest of writing

Writing in public compounds in strange ways:

1. You clarify your own thinking.
2. People find your writing years later and reach out.
3. Each post becomes raw material for the next one.

None of this requires an audience to start. It just requires starting.

Just write

The tools barely matter. What matters is a page with your name on it and the habit of filling it. Everything else — the design, the domain, the RSS feed — is details you can figure out along the way.

So this is my page. Let's see where it goes.