Traditional Vs Social Blogging3 min read

Posting on Self-Hosted Blog

Having my own WordPress blog does feel liberating and fulfills part of the desire to have a clearer online presence.

As stated in the very first post, this is not my first attempt and the motives are quite different here. First I’ve left plenty of time to mature the concept. Surely never enough to be foolproof enough but this is mainly my lack of self-confidence and massive impostor syndrome taking. One could even argue that I’ve waited way too much time before taking the plunge again and start sharing my thoughts as one of the best and well-proven way to find one’s voice is to express it in the first place (‘the proof of the pudding’).

I like this platform and the most important remains to be satisfied with each one of the steps and early journey done so far, which I am.

Social Posting

As part of writing this blog, I’m following some online writing influencers – or at least more than usual – and one of the recurring advice is to move away from traditional blogging (e.g. WordPress like here) or rather dive even deeper into big social media platforms (e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Medium).

I can see their point about how efficient this method could be both at reaching a maximum number of readers (the analogy would be to invite people at your party house out of town while everyone is going to bars downtown) and the sheer amount of data / feedbacks you can get from these platforms as opposed to your own isolated platforms (e.g. view count, trend compared to other posts, finding which topics hit the most).

They have a point and, at the same time, this website also embedded my identity. Experience has also taught me that we can never trust one’s work onto internet giants or private companies in general. For entirely understandable economic reasons, these companies are very keen on absorbing your data or work but make no commitments toward keeping it, let alone the ownership question. This resulted in numerous tools being shut down almost with very little notice and past popularity was not an insurance against this shutdown happening. After all, these companies need to run profitably and they cannot afford to keep services which no longer attract enough customers; even never ending legacy does bring it’s host of problem (looking at you Microsoft). Thus, I prefer to remain owner of my work and data, while being fine with sharing it elsewhere.

Focus on Content First

The other point I need to remind myself lies in keeping excitement for any new shiny feature, which promises to revolutionise my work.

This comes back to the classic wisdom that optimizing one’s efforts is important, it shouldn’t substitute the creation of content first. You can optimise your website, or report, or project, or gym routine, or reading list, or any other effort patterns for maximizing the results, if there is no content, the optimization will yield no gain at all. Even worse, it most likely will be a negative gain as efforts would have been focused on optimizing and not on content creation, with the potential risk of seeing those optimization efforts being ultimately wasted as the inherent lack of content led to suboptimal choices.

So I’ll stick with this blog for now but keep in mind that I also need to reach out to the external, wider audience by reposting on social media.

Closing Words

But what do you think? Am I making such a big mistake by ignoring some of these social blogging trends (e.g. https://typeshare.co/).

Thank you for reading and see you tomorrow.