Hello November | Do you still read blogs?

Do you still read blogs?

I still read blogs. In 2022. In fact I read blogs regularly, at least a few times a week. I browse headings and sometimes subheadings of Vitalik’s blog https://vitalik.ca/ and Dankrad’s blog https://dankradfeist.de/. I check out what flyinglimao has been up to by browsing his blog https://limaois.me/. I visit https://barnabe.substack.com/ when a newsletter from Barnabé Monnot lands in my inbox. Sina Habibians (whom I met briefly at EthDenver some two years ago) has an interesting blog https://sinahab.com/ and a podcast too.

My thought: blogs are still a thing. Will try to keep my blog alive and active!

Something came as a nice surprise the other day. I was meeting Alexander, a Russian software developer friend (he happens to live in Taiwan for quite a while now) whom I hadn’t met for perhaps a little longer than a year. We hung out one afternoon at a café with two other blockchain developer friends. He mentioned that the day before our meeting, he was trying to do some “internet catch-up” through browsing some of my more recent blog posts.

At that very moment of him mentioning it, I realized even for friends and acquaintances, for people I meet maybe one or two times a year, even for them, their go-to site for some catchup would still be my website. Alex was like, I didn’t know you were traveling in Europe for several months! You weren’t tweeting about it. Ok so, I guess Twitter would be the go-to, then the blog.

How to reduce self-imposed pressure?

I’m not sure if I’d like to tweet more about my up-coming trips or work or life or some interests (who cares about me enjoying fiction books, European films and concerts anyway!). There’s so much pressure (mostly self-imposed stress) to tweet. Sometimes I wonder why people want to follow me on Twitter at all. Since I don’t really tweet about myself. I mostly tweet about others and tweet about work-related activities. There really isn’t that much going on. Or maybe it’s because followers are primarily interested in the people around me!?

Oftentimes I feel overwhelmed by social media. All of these telegram crypto-related chat groups (I’ve got a ton of them). A lot of software dev-related discord groups. There’s a lot of pressure to perform well. I’m still trying to find a way to reduce my seemingly ever-growing self-imposed pressure.

Meanwhile, I entertain an idea of transforming my blogging site into one of my primary “internet catup-up” sites. Maybe I should have a different theme or a different blog framework, something other than hexo? I used hexo for my blog in part was because hydai was using it for his own blog https://hyd.ai/ . Maybe it’s about time to make the transition to something else, such as ghost?

Next post is going to be about some of the workshops/lectures that I have been taking, a few books and films I recently enjoyed.