Experimenting With the Pi5

Experimenting With the Pi5

Byrichard

The Raspberry Pi 5 is twice as powerful as previous Pis according to various sources. For the last 24 hours I have been using a Pi 5 running Ubuntu and the experience has been good. Despite being a small computer it feels as comfortable as some of the computers I have been using.

The Pi 5 feels comfortable

I have loaded several webpages at once, in various tabs, tried importing images via photoprism, whilst writing this blog post and running VS Code. So far I feel that a Pi running Ubuntu can run Nextcloud, PhotoPrism and be used to write a blog post simultaneously.

I struggled with installing VS Code but that was due to not being used to dealing with Debian packages. That was quickly resolved and that’s how I am able to experiment with blogging from a Pi 5.

The Fan Gets Quieter After the First Boot.

After the first boot the Raspberry pi 5 was noisy, with the fan running at full power until I rebooted it. On the second boot the fan started to vary in strength according to what I was doing. If you’re doing something intensive, like indexing and importing photos to photoprism then it will be noisy, but if you’re writing a blog post it will be quiet.

FrontMatter is Faster Than on a 2016 Mac Book Pro

What I especially like is that Front Matter, on a 2016 mac book pro is slow to load. On the Pi it loads all the posts within a few seconds. It helps that I moved all 2023 posts to the archive.

The point remains that if you want to write blog posts in Markdown for Hugo to generate static web pages then the Pi 5 8GB is fine.

Remembering the Recent and Distant Past

In 2008 or so I bought an EEEpc for about 300 CHF and it was relatively crap. In 2020 or so I bought a Chrome Book and it was fine for web surfing but costs about 270 CHF or so. With the EEEpc you could feel that the machine was underpowered, cheap, and huge, mainly for the battery to fit on the back. The keyboard was tiny so you had to re-learn to touch type on this device.

With the Chrome Book you have a simple laptop but not much freedom so it’s good for web browsing, but not much more, in my experience. I didn’t experiment with running it with the Linux features enabled.

Small And Light Weight

With the Pi 5 you have a computer that could fit into the small pouch of a Domke satchel. With an aluminium apple keyboard teathered by a power cable, and a mouse, you can use the Pi 5 and forget that you’re using such a small and relatively small computer.

It isn’t portable. It doesn’t have batteries, or a keyboard, or anything else, but when it’s plugged in it works well for web browsing, and hosting docker containers, and running VS Code, for blogging at least. If you’re a writer then the Pi 5 could be enough.

Bluetooth Tethering

I tried pairing a bluetooth rapoo keyboard and that worked as well. Just open the bluetooth tab, tell the keyboard you want to tether by pressing the pairing button, find it on the Pi, type in the pin, and you’re tethered. This means that you can keep the ports free for hard drives or other items.

Power Adaptor

I tried using a Pi 4 power adaptor and it worked but said that it would restrict the amount of power third party devices could draw from it. The Pi 4 has a 15W power adaptor whereas the Pi5 has a 27W adaptor.

Laptop Replacement

My Mac Book Air is old and needs replacing. By Autumn of this year it will no longer be supported by Apple. That’s why I didn’t bother to replace the battery a few weeks ago when I was considering giving it another two years of life.

I was playing with an H Elite Book recently. I have cooled to this machine because it has killed two USB devices. It killed a hard drive and a USB stick. Due to this realisation I think I will use it for experimentation, and nothing more. I don’t mind that it killed the old USB stick because I expected that it was already dead when I found it after it had been dormant in a drawer for years. When it killed the SSD I didn’t know whether the drive had died because it was cheap so I was worried for it’s twin which I am using photoprism with at the moment.

I’m happy that it’s the USB port that killed the drive, rather than a faulty drive, but I would prefer not to kill any more devices. I don’t trust the right USB port not to kill it’s own USB devices, if given the chance.

I will install NixOS on that machine and experiment with it.

And Finally

Although I bought the Pi 5 to work as a server I have realised that it can be used as a desktop for web browsing, playing video and more. I like that the Pi 5 has a fan that speeds up, or slows down, depending on how intense the work load is. This means that it can be quieter when you do simple tasks. I feel that it could replace my 1600 CHF eight year old mac book pro, with relative ease.

I should try to run kdenlive.

I’m happpy with the Pi 5, so far, after a day of experimenting.

Blogging for Three Hundred and Sixty Six Days in a Row

Blogging for Three Hundred and Sixty Six Days in a Row

Byrichard

For three hundred and sixty six days I have written a blog post daily. In some cases I wrote two posts, and scheduled the post to appear the next day. This is when I was driving for thirteen hours, or if I knew that my morning was busy. In the process I have definitely given myself a writing habit. The question I ask myself now is whether to continue, or whether to change the posting frequency.


Nothing to Say


One of the problems with posting daily is that we sometimes have nothing to say. We sit at the computer and try to find inspiration for an hour, or two, or even three. Eventually we write but is there any value in what we wrote? According to the viewer stats there isn’t. It’s a matter of just writing, for the sake of habit, and experience. It also demonstrates that I have the stamina to write every single day, even if some days are more interesting than others.


Reducing the Frequency


I’m thinking about reducing my writing frequency to once every two days, or once per week. If I write once per week then I might be as uninspired when I write daily, but weekly. In effect I’d be lazier, less disciplined, than I am at the moment. I don’t think that reducing the frequency of writing would be productive, because that would be about laziness, rather than striving.


Consistency


Writing daily, despite having nothing to say is about consistency. A toddler falls up to several hundred times in a single day when learning to walk. An adult walks 23,000 steps without even noticing, in a single day, when hiking. Writing daily might generate a lot of crap, but it also trains us to write, to type, to think, to go back and edit. It trains us to put ideas into writing. We learn to write every single day.


More Productive than Social Media


One of the reasons I decided to blog daily, is that I saw that Facebook and Instagram were making money from the time I spent on their sites and I thought “I should invest that time into my own site”. I did. That’s why I now blog daily, and I’ve had the habit for three hundred and sixty six days in a row. I do feel like changing the rules for myself.


Photographs and Video


At the moment I post written blog posts, but now that I have written blog posts for three hundred and sixty six days I could change it up. On some das I could post a video, and on others I could post photographs. The point of a photograph is that I could spend 30 seconds on a blog post, rather than one to three hours per day. I proved that I could write daily for an entire year. Now I can reward myself, by changing the rules.


The Road that Became a River


Two days ago I ran by a road that became a river, and I should have stopped to take photos or video. If I had then I could show just how heavy the rain had been, over a period of hours and days. High winds are forecast overnight. It could be fun to capture the waves crashing on shore. If the temperature dropped then it could be fun to capture the ice formation.


And Finally


With the change in format I hope to spend less time on blogging. I want to continue blogging but I want to give myself to post an image, rather than write. Writing takes time.

NaNoWriMo and Blogging

NaNoWriMo and Blogging

Byrichard

November is the month when a group of people try to write 1667 words per day for a month. they have write-in events, word sprints and many other gimmicks to encourage them to break the challenge into less daunting challenges. I didn’t even consider participating this year for a simple reason. This is my 360th day in a row of writing a daily blog post.


The Daily Blog Challenge


My challenge was less ambitious. My goal was to write at least three hundred words per day, every day, without taking days off. I didn’t allow myself to count a photo as a blog post because that would be too easy. I wanted to give myself a productive challenge.


I chose to write a blog post every single day for two reasons. The first is that I grew tired of seeing ads and posts I didn’t care about on Facebook. I grew tired that the time that Facebook was wasting was benefiting them, without benefiting them. By writing a blog post daily I would “waste” an hour or two every single day. Eventually though, that waste of time would benefit me. The first benefit is that every single day for 360 days I have had to stop, think, and write.


Some days I would sit in front of the computer looking for inspiration for an hour or two and find none. This didn’t matter. I always think of something to write. Every day i have a blog post to show for that two or three hours of focus.


NaNoWriMo is 1667 Words Per Day For A month


If you try the NaNoWriMo challenge you have to write 1667 words per day, and you need to try to create a novel, if possible. It is the National Novel Writing Month after all. I like the idea of writing every day, but I hate the idea of writing fiction at the rate of 1667 words per day. It’s my inner censor, that I am not good at controlling. My inner censor, when it comes to fiction writing tells me that it’s crap, and that I should stop wasting my time.


Achieved Once


Quite a few years ago I achieved NaNoWriMo. I reached the daily word count. I enjoyed the writing process but I never had the strength of character to re-read and edit what I wrote, so it lay dormant. Every subsequent time I tried to write a NaNoWriMo challenge my inner censor got me to give up. I don’t have the confidence to participate and achieve this challenge.


If I want to catch up with the NaNoWriMo challenge I would need to write a further 10,000 words today, and that is what I don’t like about the challenge. When you’re working towards such a high word count you waste words and effort. You write, in three hundred words, what you could write in ten.


Imagine going from micro blogging to NaNoWriMo. The contrast is huge.


Fighting the Inner Censor


When you write 1667 words per day you don’t need every word to be kept. The aim is to be verbose so that a week or two down the line you have something to edit, re-write, and re-work. The aim is to let go of the thought that you’re writing crap, and to get ideas on paper. The aim is to spend the next eleven months re-editing everything that you have written, into something that is more interesting, and more worthwhile.


According to WordPress.com I have written 322 posts this year, containing 167,000 words. I achieved this by writing at least three hundred words per day, every single day of this year so far. I like having this daily goal, and habit, and the beauty of this is that it’s a year long project, rather than a one month goal. The habit is part of my daily routine, for several seasons now.


The community is built around a website but events also take place in the physical world, so if you participate you can meet people in person, and write at the same time as they write. This is a challenge where you can expand your social network. A few years ago I went to events but not recently.


NanoWriMo Discounts


Aside from getting into the writing habit, you also get discounts via the website. This means that if you want to use Novlr, Day One, Freewrite, Scrivener or other options you can get a discount. In some cases you get a free year. In others you get a discount.


Complete Freedom


You don’t need to write a novel. You can write e-mails, blog posts, a work of fiction, poetry or anything. In theory you could count anything you write. Writing is writing. Writing daily is writing daily. Fighting the inner censor that says “stop writing junk” is one of the key challenges writers like me had to overcome.


And Finally


One reason for which bloggers should not participate in NaNoWriMo is that the blog post that could have been done in three hundred years gets prolonged and extended, from that quick to read three minutes, to something that takes four and a half minutes to read.

Blogging with VS Code and Hugo

Blogging with VS Code and Hugo

Byrichard

Yesterday I had no inspiration. In the end I did write about something but only after hours of staring at a hypothetical blank page. When I did start writing I used Frontmatter to generate the page but I forgot to open terminal and write the blog post using VIM. I used VSCode and Markdown. Whilst this might sound ordinary to most I did this because I like writing blog posts with VIM as it gets me to learn, over time, how to use it, automatically, rather than by struggling.

Very Fast

I really like blogging with hugo, VIM and VS Code because it’s quick and efficient. With Frontmatter I can create the front matter I need for the Markdown document, and then I can start writing, until inspiration dries up, or I have nothing left to say.

Git, Git FTP and VIM

I then add the blog post to git, type hugo, generate the new page, and then git add all the publish files before going to a second directory and writing git FTP publish. If I wanted to be more of a purist I could do everything from within one or two terminal windows. One terminal window is to keep a live preview of the page, and the second is for git, git ftp and VIM.

The hugo Command and FTP

Although my site is large it is still faster to run hugo, to update and then ftp the site. Although FTP is seen as old fashioned it works well. I did add a safety feature. I created an FTP account just for the blog and I specified the directory. This means that if people do get access to that FTP account they can only change what is within the blog directory, nothing else. I’m applying the “minimum privileges to get things done” principle to keep the site secure.

Slow WordPress

When you go from VSCode, vim and git to keep a site up to date to WordPress Wordpress feels slow and clunky. WordPress requires you to be online, to navigate to the right page, and the create content, before eventually saving, and checking that it works. The 26 seconds that it takes to generate the latest page and associated pages still feels faster than WordPress.

And Finally

The beauty of using Hugo rather than WordPress is that it’s fast. It’s almost instant to navigate to all pages. The let down is that you do need to spend some time reading the fantastic manuals to learn how to do specific things. With WordPress it’s built in and simplified.

Blogging and Medium

Blogging and Medium

Byrichard

During the early days of the pandemic I wrote for at least one days every day. I was blogging the pandemic experience from my point of view. More recently I have kept up another blogging streak. This time I am reaching day 274 as I write this blog post.

Developing a Writing Habit

I mention this because when Medium was first created I liked the idea of a website where we could share writing daily, but at the same time I blogged irregularly and didn’t have a voice. As a result I created an account but never used it. Things have changed now. Now I have written for 274 days in a row. Writing has become part of my daily routine. I was toying between the idea of Substack and Medium but I prefer Medium for the reason that I dislike the idea of sending an e-mail that will be ignored. I subscribe to newsletters but almost never read them. Usually I go through them when working on Inbox zero. E-mails stroke the ego of the writer, but they’re just noise.

No Obligation to Read

In contrast Medium posts are more volatile. They appear in our timelines but we are under no obligation to click through and read them. This is better. Most of what we write has little value but the act of writing, in and of itself has value. It is by writing that we develop the habit of thinking, not just 140 characters, or even 1000 characters, but for an ever growing stream of conscience.

Practicing with VIM

For a while I was using Day One to write my blog posts but the software kept crashing on me so I dumped it for VIM. What I like about VIM is that it’s minimal. I get to practice writing Markdown whilst at the same time practicing with VIM. Vim is a powerful tool that is worth getting familiar with.

The Decline of Social Media and the Increase in Attention

As I write this I read a post about people no longer reading. I read every single day. I read both from a kindle before going to sleep, but also from Audible during my daily walks or runs. Remember that if you don’t have to read in one format, you can always read with another one.

The same was said of blogging. “I don’t have time to blog because I’m distracted by social media”. That was true before. During the pandemic something changed. Social Media emptied of conversations and people we would desire to meet in person, either because we wanted to self-isolate, or because we grew tired of seeing others ignore COVID lockdowns. That’s why I quit Facebook and Instagram. I was tired of feeling more lonely, rather than less lonely.

The Silver Lining

By becoming less sticky Social Media freed us to do other things. It freed us to study, to read, to write, and to work on projects again. For wishful thinkers the pandemic is over. For others, like me, the habits that helped me cope with solitude are still valid now. Now that I have a writing habit that is consistent, I can share blog posts, rather than tweets, toots or notes, depending on wheither you’re on Twitter, Mastodon, Firefish, other Fediverse instances, Threadiverse, or other.

Online Communities

Remember, before Social Media took over online conversations we had social networks. Bloggers are part of a social network. Medium is a social Network. The Fediverse is a social network. Social networks are centered around human being communicating by electronic means. The problem with Corporate Social Media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram TikTok, Threds and others, is that they use algorithms to control the conversation, rather than chronology. Mastodon and the Fediverse are chronological social networks, like the real world. where conversations take place in real time, where algorithms don’t manufacture conflict.

A Personal Blog First, Medium Second

Sharecropping between Medium and a Personal Blog is the reason for which I didn’t want to post to Medium. I’d rather have my own blog, that I write for, daily, and then share on Medium. I have had my own website since 1996. I left Facebook because I felt they benefited more from me wasting my time, than I got.

User ROI

Since 2007 or so I said that Social Media companies spent so much time thinking about ROI for brands, PR firms and corporations that they forgot about ROI for the user. This is demonstrated beautifully by the Threads situation. It picked up one hundred million users within days, but lost four fifths of them within a week or two. Threads forgot about the ROI that users got out of being on their app. I loved the idea of Substack Notes until I saw that it was a popularity contest. My enthusiasm for Substack lasted for minutes.

Medium

As I mentioned above I like Medium because we can read or ignore what people write, without having to mark things as read. We can also read articles on the site or app, when we’re on the app, rather than working through e-mails. I like the idea of revenue sharing but I don’t like that some content is paywalled. I feel that this removes from the user experience. There are two issues with the Paywall:

  • We need to pay to finish articles

  • By paying to read articles our content has to have much more traffic to break even.

And Finally

Medium doesn’t have to be a mirror of my blog. It can highlight the better content, the content I feel is worthy of being shared more broadly. Now i the time to start a new experiment.

Of Blogging and Substacking

Of Blogging and Substacking

Byrichard

A month or two ago we had the chance to jump on the Substack wagon while it was hot and to ride the wave of new followers and experience a growing community. I could have joined in. I could have become one of those “I’m one of you people” but I didn’t. 


Substack Life


Substack went from being a newsletter to almost becoming a community of writers. I say “almost”, because for me to consider a community a community it has to behave like a community. It has to be a network of friends of friends, and it has to be about individuals connecting with other individuals, through their community. 


With Substack it went from “Wow, notes look great” to “My follower numbers have exploded”, “oh so have mine”, and that’s when I disengaged. People behaved the same way on Twitter and the community was degraded into a network of strangers following each other and fighting for attention. Within the space of hours the network that it could have become was degraded to a popularity contest. I have no interest in these. If I wanted to join one I could socialise in the physical world of bars and other places. 


What I don’t like about Substack, and social media in general, is that it’s about users creating content for the owners of the social network, and then making money off of our backs, without giving us anything in exchange. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other networks have all made this move. 


On Blogging


With tools like WordPress, among many others we have the freedom to generate content, and choose whether to pay for our own hosting, and manage our own websites and attempt to monetise them, or jump onto Wordpress.com and other solutions. and just create content for the pleasure of it. 


I mention pleasure, because with blogs we write because we have inspiration. Either we have done something that we want to share, or we have an opinion on something, that we want to get out of our minds, by putting it on screen, and then forgetting about it. 


I prefer to blog because although it could be e-mailed to someone it is usually just one post, in a timeline, among many others. People can look at it, think “this is dull and boring” and move on. With blogs there is no obligation to read any post. It’s all about whims. 


With Substack the opposite is true. You write a post, you e-mail it, and people have to swipe to it, keep it on screen until it’s marked as read, before moving on. 


I like e-mail for private conversations, but feel that newsletters et al would be better served by being blog posts that we can opt in to reading. or skip and ignore. 


And Finally


I prefer blogging to Substack Newsletter writing for two reasons. The first is that I want to write about anything, rather than on a specific theme. The second reason is that I don’t want to generate content that someone else will benefit from, more than I will. I don’t want to be used and exploited. With blogs I do not feel that way. With Substack I do., I went from being a person to a statistic within hours of Substack Notes being created. 

One Hundred and Eighty Two Days of Blogging in a Row

One Hundred and Eighty Two Days of Blogging in a Row

Byrichard

With the decline in the value of social media so the value of blogging has come back up. By blogging, rather than using social media, for at least an hour or two I am forcing myself to think, and to elaborate on ideas that would otherwise go without conclusion. Having a thought that is shared in 140 characters is easy. Having a thought that is three hundred words long is not. 


Although three hundred words doesn’t sound like much, and takes a few seconds to skim through it can take an hour or two to write. Today I wrote about chatGPT and why I didn’t like this move, but decided to leave that post as a draft, rather than publish it. I want blog posts to be positive, when possible. 


The issue with social media, in recent years, is that it has forgotten that it should be about individuals and communities, rather than advertisers. If individuals and communities are scuppered by the social media giants then it makes sense to return to the metaphorical village of personal blogs and websites. 


Now that social media has become a waste of time I enjoy investing that time in blogging. For an hour or two I spend time thinking, elaborating ideas and then writing a blog post. Most of these posts are never read. Blogging isn’t about being seen or read. I think blogging is akin to mindfulness or meditation. 


I use meditate in the French sense of the word, deep thinking, or to prepare something after a lot of thought. Blogging is the result of reflection, although it might not feel like it, when read. Blogging is a break from the world, to elaborate an idea, before posting it and forgetting about it. 


Most blog posts are not read. I’m developing a writing habit, and my writing skills, in a public place that no one visits.  

To Blog Or To Newsletter, That Is The Question

To Blog Or To Newsletter, That Is The Question

Byrichard

With the sudden growth of audiences for newsletter writers on sub stacks as they start to use Notes so the question emerges on whether to dump blogging, for news lettering. In theory by news lettering on Substack we grow an audience that is pre-packaged and ready to go. 


The drawback is that there are two types of content makers. Those that want their readers to read everything they write, and to pay them for the obligation to read what they write and the bloggers. 


The point of blogging is never to get millions of views, or even thousands. The idea of blogging is to share ideas, adventures and thoughts on products, books and more. The idea of blogging is of writing about something that no may not be read for weeks, months or even years. The idea is to allow people to find what they were looking for organically, through search, discussion, or simple browsing. 


The problem with newsletters, and email based articles, is that we have to “read” the message but instead we skim. We don’t read e-mails when they arrive, we read skim them, or just mark them as read, to make them vanish. I don’t like newsletters because they become backlogged in our mailboxes. They stagnate for days, weeks or even months, and they’re a ToDo because they’re marked as unread. 


The beauty of blogs is that you visit the blog, you find the headlines that interest you, and then you read. There is no To Do. There is no expectation. 


At the moment my blog is especially “noisy” because I am trying to write every single day, so there is a lot of worthless writing. If we were in normal times then I would be blogging about rock climbing, via ferrata, hiking and cycling. Instead I am writing about hiking in circles, random ideas, and cycling. In normal times my blog isin a focused niche. 


Aside from anything else I feel that by using Substack rather than WordPress or other blogging platforms, we are making more money for someone else, than we are making for ourselves. People develop a platform, get people to engage and then say “look at us, we helped writers make millions”.  


with Substack, Twitter, and other platforms we are creating content that someone else is monetising. Although we might get a percentage they benefit more than we do. 


I write for pleasure, and for experience. I like to browse. 


And finally


I could continue writing about this for hours but at the end of the day it boils down to something very simple. There are two types of content makers. Those that want to be industrially farmed like chickens and cattle, in industrial farms like Substack, YouTube and others, and free range bloggers, who like to be “outdoors, scratching a living, digging niches(nid-de-poules) 😉 and resting under trees.
Are you a free range blogger, or an industrially farmed blogger?” 😉

The Futility of Blogging

The Futility of Blogging

Byrichard

I have been writing blog posts every single day for one hundred and fourty five days and rather than feel more inspired, and get a big audience, I am writing for an audience of one. Some days I am filled with inspiration and I write the blog post in twenty minutes or less. Other days it takes me an hour or two. It’s hard to write every day because some days are interesting, so there is something to talk about, and other days are dull. 


Mindful


I spend more time blogging because it’s a chance to look inwards, and outwards. it is an opportunity to spend time thinking and formulating ideas. It does count as mindfulness but only if we use the Day One app on the iPhone. On the laptop it doesn’t count. This should be fixed. 


Bickering


Twitter and Substack are in the news at the moment because they’re arguing. Substack is bringing out a “Notes” product, to fill the microblogging niche, and Musk is not happy, but Musk had Revue, before he terminated the project, so he’s arguing for nothing. Rather than excel at what it does Twitter is sliding backwards. Substack has 34 million users, and Twitter has 130 million if you look at who follows Musk, and 240 million if you look at other figures. Twitter could easily be overtaken. Twitter probably will be overtaken, as it has gone from being a source for collaboration and inspiration, to a place for bickering. 


Yesterday I posted a few tweets. Not a single reply. Twitter is now a ghost network. Those that would converse with me have left, so Twitter is losing its “stickiness”. It is losing users. 


A Bike In The Car


I put the bike in the car yesterday. It fits easily and this is great. It opens up the regions around which I can cycle, without having to cycle along some of the busier roads. I could drive to Palais and try to do some riding there, as I have been wanting to do for years. I can go to the top of the Jura and range around there. It provides me with more flexibility for more adventures. 

One Hundred And One Blog Posts in One Hundred and One Days

One Hundred And One Blog Posts in One Hundred and One Days

Byrichard

I have written at least one hundred and one blog posts in one hundred and one days. During this time most blogs have gone by unread. Blogging could be seen as futile but it isn’t. Having the discipline to write every single day, despite having no inspiration is good. It forces us to stop, think, and develop inexistent ideas.


In different times I would not write one hundred and one blog posts about nothing but we’re in a pandemic that is being ignored by the people with the power to get us out of it. This means fewer conferences, fewer meetings with people to do sports activities and more. It means less freedom to find covid safe work. It means living with the constant risk of getting long COVID. Switzerland is living in denial about the pandemic and this is frustrating.


The Swiss radio and television removed COVID from their news site. They don’t even keep it as a tribute to the last three years. For them the pandemic is over. You watch the news and you see no masks, no safety measures. Nothing.


Not Waiting For Inspiration


If I waited for inspiration then the blog would be dormant, as it has been for the last decade and a half. It would be updated when I do something out of the ordinary. It would be updated for an interesting bike ride or an interesting walk. It would document an interesting idea, or event. Instead it is about the thing that inspires me enough to write three hundred words


The Stereotypical Blog


Recently I was looking for books about blogging and they’re all about the same thing. Monetisation. They’re all about making money, rather than about exploring and developing ideas. They are all about financial gain rather than idea development. If I found a book about blogging to share ideas and experiences, rather than to make money, I would be tempted. A blog should be about sharing and developing ideas.


Blogging as an Investment


Social media today is about the ego of the people who own the companies. Twitter has become a chaotic mess that sold for 44 billion. Facebook is a social network that used to be about friends and friendships until Zynga ruined the experience for everyone. Instagram was great, until it was bought by Facebook and turned into a glossy mag that promotes influences, rather than human beings. Before you tell me off, I posted more than three thousand images over a period of years. I stopped using it because it made me feel lonely.


Blogging is a worthwhile social media replacement because we generate content for our own blog site. We practice writing, and if we get enough traffic then we can generate a small revenue. If we’re going to spend time on the world wide web then we might as well do something that benefits us personally. As I have said plenty of times, social networks forget that ROI should be about generating value for users, not just for corporate interests. Blogging does provide ROI for the user, me.


Social media was about community, but with time, and algorithms, community has been destroyed. It is now a shouting match. I like blogging. I try to write positive blog posts. It takes effort to be positive. The natural instinct is to write about what bothers me, rather than what I enjoy.


And Finally


Blogging is about taking half an hour to an hour and a half to think, and to develop the ideas I think about. It’s like going for a walk, where the steps are taken by my fingers. It’s a moment to turn inwards. I will continue this habit.