It’s currently February 2026. ‘Blog’ was named as Merriam-Webster’s word of year way back in 2004 (in a sign of how much the times have changed, it was sandwiched between ‘democracy’ in 2003 and ‘integrity’ in 2005). Since then, the open web and human curation has been eaten by social media and The Algorithm. So, why start writing things by hand and putting them on my own website? And why might you want to too?

Writing helps thinking

There’s something about the act of writing things down that helps me think things through. Putting some words in order forces you to organise your thoughts, and putting that focus on things helps to bring your assumptions or gaps in thinking to the surface. I’ve never been the kind of person to diligently keep a diary or journal, but perhaps this can fill that space a bit.

The threat of an audience

If just writing is valuable on its own, why bother to publish it? One reason is the threat of an audience—if in theory anyone can read this, I should probably try not to write total rubbish. Or else, keep at it often enough that there’s some good stuff coming out of it by sheer weight of numbers.

That audience isn’t just a push for me to do things properly, but hopefully has some value in itself. Not much useful happens in isolation, so any connections or collaborations that turn up from the right person reading the right thing at the right time are something to grab on to. Even if that collaboration is just my future self re-reading something and thinking it through in a new light. That is just me reinventing the concept of a diary, isn’t it? I think that’s fine.

Old man yells at cloud

So much of the internet is built on shaky foundations; links rot, archives get paywalled, communities move to private discords, and social networks get taken over by even less agreeable billionaires than the ones that came before. There’s something nice about owning content and knowing it’ll stick around until I decide to remove it forget to renew the domain or whatever. People can link to it and it can stay useful and discoverable. A little nail house of hand-crafted internet sticking out against the future.