A Year of Blogging Dangerously
2024 October 17
It’s been almost exactly a year since I decided to get back into updating this blog! Let’s step back and take stock.
The short story is: I’ve really, really enjoyed getting back into the habit. Simply put, I missed writing. If not for this blog, I certainly would have done a whole lot less of it over the past year.
This is my 45th post since restarting. If you look at my posting pattern, it ought to be clear that I’ve been aiming for an approximately weekly cadence. But I haven’t tried to commit to a specific posting schedule, and I made the explicit choice to let myself take a week off here and there as needed. Thus far, at least, I’ve been able to keep up the motivation and more-or-less regular posting without adhering to structure more rigid than that, and I’m happy with where things are at.
It usually takes me about half a day to write a substantial post. This is a non-trivial time investment! And some weeks, I’m feeling not-so-inspired, and I deliberately choose to write something short and easy. There are definitely mornings where I say to myself “Ugggh, I ought to post something but I’ve got alllll this other stuff to do.” But overall, this has all felt like a good use of my time. With the job role that I’ve had for the past several years, if I wasn’t blogging I’d have very little to document what I’ve been up to. You could certainly make the argument that instead of blogging I should’ve been finding a way to turn my projects into refereed publications, and maybe you’d be right. In the abstract, publishing is certainly better than not publishing. But all I can say is that I don’t spend a lot of time agonizing about the balance that I’ve struck. I think it’s important to be able to show what you’ve been up to, but in many cases the “blog post” level feels sufficient to me; you could imagine fleshing out some items into full papers, but honestly it doesn’t feel like a good use of either my or other peoples’ time. I hate the idea of wasting everyone’s time with pages for formal text when a few informal paragraphs would do, just to add another line to the CV.
And the other major piece is that where I’m at right now, publishing regularly does not feel like it would actually contribute to my long-term professional security. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but that’s my read of my situation.
Besides acting as basic documentation of what I’ve been doing, one very rewarding thing is that I’ve found that blogging has been really useful at helping me develop ideas from their initial seeds to something a bit more well-rounded. I am a very, very big believer in the idea that the best way to refine a thought is to try to write about it with some precision. Obviously, at the half-day level of effort, we’re talking about getting things to half- or perhaps three-quarters-baked, not fully baked, but I’ve really enjoyed having an obvious space to do this kind of writing-thinking. There are a lot of times when I’m genuinely looking forward to writing a post because I can feel that it’s going to help me figure out something that I’ve been stuck on. Now, it’s true that lots of ideas really ought to be developed into formal scholarly publications; both the process and the end product are hugely important — I’m not one of those people that thinks that nothing needs to go past the preprint stage. But to be honest, not everything does; and writing about an idea informally seems like a great way to gauge whether it’s worth developing more fully.
Another very reassuring thing is that I’ve never come close to feeling like I’m out of things to write about. I keep a simple list of post topic ideas in case inspiration runs dry, but I’d say that in at least half of my weeks, there’s something on my mind that causes me to think, “Ah, that’s a great topic for this week’s post.” Sometimes it’s something external that caught my attention, like the Software Citation Station preprint or a Mastodon toot about LaTeX. Often it’s a project that I’ve been working on, as in the many posts about DASCH or HPC software engineering. In particular, it’s pretty gratifying to feel like I’m bringing enough creativity to my “day job” work (DASCH, right now) that there’s almost always something about what I’ve done recently that feels interesting and worth sharing.
Those are all the positives. The big negative is that I still feel like I have no idea if anyone is reading this. While I do have Google Analytics for my site, I don’t even bother to look at the numbers, because it’s so hard to know what to make of them; absolute calibration feels impossible. If Google told me that I had 5,000 visitors in a day, I’d easily believe that only 5 of them were actual humans. I feel like the only thing you can really do with these numbers is see whether they’re trending up or down, and at the moment even the trends don’t feel that important to me. In the same way that I don’t think that adding refereed publications is particularly helpful to my professional security, I really don’t think that a popular blog would be either. For the time being, it feels better to focus on writing about whatever interests me, and let the chips fall where they may.
That being said, I did have hopes that adding a newsletter subscription mode would give me some insight into who was reading and how things were going. Unfortunately the uptake has been, how shall we say … laughable? Pathetic? So bad that I can’t bring myself to post an actual number. This despite the fact that I’ve tried to emphasize “subscribe to the newsletter” as a call-to-action (CTA) nearly everywhere on the site that makes sense.
As a tangible example, a friend let me know that my “LaTeX Can Be The New LaTeX” post made it to the front page of Hacker News for at least a little while. On the plus side, that’s wonderful evidence that at least someone is reading. On the minus side, the event resulted in zero new newsletter subscriptions. I’m sure that I could improve the CTA, but is it seriously that bad? I could tell myself optimistically that maybe my RSS feed is so incredibly appealing that it cannibalizes many people who would otherwise subscribe to the newsletter, but that feels like wishful thinking. (What makes RSS so nice is precisely what prevents it from being friendly to analytics, and I wouldn’t have it any other way … but it would also be kind of nice to be able to get some insight into who’s reading the feed!)
It’s true that I haven’t been advertising the newsletter anywhere away from the site. In particular, one thing that (sort of) I wanted to try was asking people to subscribe to the newsletter at the end of my professional talks — it’s always kind of bothered me to end a talk without a particular CTA, and “like and subscribe” may be annoying but there’s a reason it’s ubiquitous in other contexts. I’ve never seen anyone do this in academia, and it would certainly feel awkward as hell, but as with the newsletter in general: I think it actually makes sense? But as it’s happened, I’ve hardly given any talks in the past year, so I simply haven’t had the opportunity to see how it goes. (“Cite and subscribe”?) I’ll be speaking to a large audience at ADASS soon, though, so I’ll be able to increase my sample size by one!
It should be pretty clear that I haven’t obsessing over traffic numbers in this first year. Partially this is because I’m something of a gentleman farmer when it comes to blogging: this is a hobby, not my livelihood. I have to admit, though, that there’s also a fear element — you can’t fail if you don’t try! That can be a cozy lifestyle, but stepping back, I don’t love it. Andy Wingo recently wrote a relevant short piece titled, bluntly, fedi [that is, the Fediverse] is for losers, the point being that if you want to actually make a difference in the world, you do have to get out there, get out of your comfort zone, and engage with people. I don’t aspire to have millions of followers, but in the end scholarship is about not just having ideas but about getting other people to adopt them.
But as of today, I don’t have a detailed vision for Year Two of the blog; some of that will depend on what exactly happens with my employment as a researcher, which is still up in the air. At a minimum, though, I certainly plan to keep at it. As the folks at Defector often say: Onward!