Blogging

Everything is political now Mike Masnick wrote an article on Techdirt recently about why he’s leaning in to “political” coverage on the site. To put it succinctly: When the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore. It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist. I get that there are people who might want to escape politics in the safe haven of technology. I don’t understand people who still insist that it’s possible to participate in and use FOSS apolitically. Too many things are intertwined to be able to separate the development and distribution of FOSS from politics. ...

New Year’s Resolution accomplished One of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2025 was to move my blog away from WordPress.com. The reasons for that should be relatively obvious, but you can read my most recent article about it if you aren’t up on the latest shenanigans around Automattic and such. It’s a disappointing tale, to be sure. I had decided a few years ago that I was done futzing with new blogging platforms and was standardizing on WordPress. It was not a perfect platform, to be sure, but it was ubiquitous and seemed like it’d be stable for another 20 years. Obviously my crystal ball was not looking far enough into the future. 20 months, perhaps, but not 20 years. ...

Nice post I discovered on the Orange site today, " I don’t like making the best things." Short summary, trying to make the “best” things gets in the way of doing things we enjoy. Specifically the author talks about blogging less often after they discovered they “only want to publish the best things, so I didn’t publish at all.” Not exactly a new concept, but one that we probably all need to hear or read on a regular basis. It’s certainly something that’s blocked me quite a bit. Feeling like you always need to put something out that’s perfect is a really good way to never get things done. It’s the enemy of fun and the enemy of productivity. ...

Stumped for ideas what to blog about? Not sure what people would want to read that would be worth writing about? Here’s 20 prompts to get you started (some tweaking may be required). Yesterday I wrote about the 100 days of blogging challenge. A friend of mine asked if I had a good source of prompts for folks interested in doing something similar. Truth is, I hadn’t thought much about that.

Infrastructure and code aren’t the only things in your organization that incur technical debt. Content marketing on blogs is a major offender. Here’s just three things to cut down on technical debt in your content marketing on blogs. Content marketing practice to avoid: Bare URLs/URIs in content Be kind to your readers and to yourself: Stop putting bare URIs / URLs in your content. Bare URLs - that is, something like www.example.com/document should never be in prose on the web. No, you’re not doing your content marketing any favors with cutesy shortened URLs or campaign vanity URLs. It’s not 2003, nobody is going around memorizing URLs anymore. ...