All fired up with nothing to say
God, I love starting new blogs. I spent the past few days digging into Write.as and getting comfortable with the idea of doing most of my longer-form writing here. I made a plan.
Blogging
Cross-posting (or not)
If I didn't want anyone to read the things I post online, I'd just use my typewriter and toss everything in a drawer. Since I'm (mostly) not doing that, I must want people to read me, right?
One thing that helps “get the word out” about new posts is to cross-post everything to social media. I use Micro.blog for that. I just point it at any of my RSS feeds and each post is immediately sent to my Twitter and Mastodon accounts. Easy peasy!
That said, I've disabled all cross-posting again. Sure, I want people to be able to read my stuff, but I don't want to force them to.
This feeling started over at my wiki. It's nice to be able to write things and have them just sort of sit there, quietly, not disturbing anyone. A few people come to visit every day, and that makes me feel good. It's all I need, really. If I do want to share something, I can simply post a link, manually, like a Neanderthal.
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(This is posted on Write.as, so I suppose technically it's being shown at read.write.as but since that's an integral part of the platform, I'm not counting it.)
Write.as
I signed up for Write.as in 2018, wrote one post, and left. I think I was enamored with Ghost or Hugo or TiddlyWiki or something at the time.
I’ve since abandoned Ghost, as I don’t like their focus on monetization and “Building An Audience” and I don’t love the founder. I’m using Hugo for my primary blog today, but, as happens occasionally, I tire of the static blog publishing workflow.
Recent mentions of the 5-year price break for Write.as prompted me to take another look and I was surprised by how far it has come. I like the developers’ tone and I like the writing environment and I like the look of published blogs. It also has comments, federation, newsletters, a public API, and a good attitude.
$3/month for 5 years is a commitment, but it’s cheaper than the smallest VPS (monthly) and more featureful than a static blog on Netlify or Github pages.
I’m giving it a try. If for some reason I switch to something else (let’s be honest, who knows where I'll be?), I’ll consider the money spent to be an investment in a useful, open, well-meaning writing tool.