Starting The Blog

2025-06-20
J.M. Janzen

Dear programmer or other tech afflicted obsessive. If you start your blog with code, you will just keep writing code, because--spoiler--writing code is fun, creative, and lets you practice what you're good at. Whereas writing regular-human-readable text is squishy and uncomfortable. Human text may have a syntax, but it has an infuriatingly elastic fail condition. You can even fail in ways more logical than syntactic and be congratulated on it (I could name a few authors here, but an inaugural blog post is not the place to be making enemies).

So while a typo may cause a sentence to fail interpretation on the client's end, you're not going to get an error message. Even worse, if your point is illogical or just bad, you can still serve it and share, and maybe even spread it. That's just the risk you take when sharing squishy thoughts instead of hard, clean code.

Which brings me to...

Step 1: Don't Start by Building a CMS

Real people won't see your code. Even most people-of-tech won't. Like, are you running to check out the source code for this blog? I don't think so. So who's the real audience? That's right, it's you. It's always been you. So you're writing for yourself. Why not write about yourself? And then maybe the odd lost netizen has a chance to learn a bit about what you've got to say.

So put the compiler down. You, with the transpiler--in the back; put that down too. Do not start the blog by building a CMS, unless you plan to write about building a CMS. And then only build the CMS after you've started your blog (but that's my idea -- go get your own (actually, I take it back, we can share)).

Step 2: Wait 6 Years for Inspiration to Strike

You may elect to skip this step, but I'm just sharing my own process, and procrastinating for 6+ years and then one day deciding to start writing for my personal homepage is a process that worked me. YMMV.

Step 3: Pick a Topic

Ideally this will be something other than "Starting The Blog" and will be something of actual interest to others and not just scrape bait for LLMs. But the important thing is to actually just start. So if you've got a more interesting idea than mine then you're doing great. Just write about that.

From what I've seen as a voracious reader of others' blogged material, one's first blog is usually buried deep in a stack of others. Once the nerd gets to blogging, it seems like it's hard for them to stop (not me, though, I'll be different. This is it for me. This one article, humph).

Step 3.1: Write from the Heart

Sidenote on the topic of LLMs, I would avoid using them to generate your text, not just because it degrades the quality of writing on the open net (think of the poor, OC hungry bot farms), but because it doesn't add anything of value if what you're trying to express are your own thoughts.

Look at the above paragraphs--these could easily be expanded to a 5 or 10 minute read by prompting for elaboration. It might even be more interesting, but it won't be yours, because what you omit is just as much a function of your writing as what you include -- whether intentionally or not.

OK, sorry about the rant. But yeah, just pick something to talk about -- something you yourself want to write about. There is of course no guarantee that anyone will want to read it, but that was never the point. The point is the saying.

Step 4: Avoid Creep

Dear reader, I'm assuming that you are technically inclined, and so I beseech you to avoid feature creep. If, however you are a regular schmegular human being who doesn't know a transport layer from an event bus, you already ahead of the game here, and can skip this step.

OK nerds, at the risk of repeating Step 1 I need you to stop. Just stop playing with your software for 1 day, so that you can do This Thing--this Blog Writing Thing. I get it, though. For instance, just while writing this short blog, I desperately wanted to add:

  1. Anchor tags for sub headers
  2. Custom template functions
  3. Live reloading (will actually want this pretty soon)
  4. A hashing function so client could verify written text??

I need you to write these ideas down, and move on. Codify them as issues, tickets, or even just // TODOs in your source code. I myself have a plain old todo.txt file sitting in the root of this repo (untracked, because I have some pride).

Ideally you will be choosing a plain format for your writing. Whether that be serving actual plain text, transpile markdown, or just html like me. I personally went with the latter, because--after years abstracting it behind various JS libraries--there is a kind of perverse thrill to just slinging fkn raw html at folks. Also, it gives me a chance to play with Emmet + emmet-vim.

Step 5: Obviously it's POSSE, right?

See here for a good definition, and here for an expanded discussion. It stands for Post on Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere. Basically what this means is that you own the homebase of your thoughts, and the socials get copies.

If you even partake in the mainstream socials, these are your thoughts so you deserve to have total control over them. I'm not going advocate for homelabing here, because that's a) a more specialized set of... interests, and b) not always super feasible in every municipality.

I won't list them all out here, because you will be inundated with options if you just perform a simple web search on the topic, but a few standouts are Neocities (I think it skews pretty young, so I'm not totally comfortable wading my middle-aged self into that group of fellow kids), and... Actually, that's it. I know I said a few, but that's all I can remember off the top of my head, and like I said, you can easily just search for yourself.

Step 6: Include Lots of Links!!!

This is more a matter of opinion, but it's my blog and this is my opinion. Or, as Daniel the Melon puts it Every site needs a Links Page. Basically, any website without external links is a dead end (looking at a lot of professional "brand" websites (including my own)). And no, linking to other areas where you have a web presence doesn't count! Links are a chance for you to share the loot of the internet, your interests, um

Step 7: Exit Early

Ideally, keep it short. But if you can't do that, leave with something unsaid. Not as engagement bait (you should not be focusing on that), but just to leave some room for your reader's imagination. Give them the space to exercise some creativity in the reading of your article.

The above will also help if you struggle with over-explaining. This isn't a Reddit flame thread, where you have to add defensive qualifiers for every single point, or else risk getting roasted on your weakest point. There is no invisible audience, or chorus of up and down -voters here, so any fans or haters that make it to your inbox have got there honestly.