[tif] simon willison on link blogs
Simon Willison is a co-creator of Django, gives great talks at events like PyCon, and is the kind of netizen we should all aspire to be more like. In his My approach to running a link blog post and the rest of his how I blog series, he lets you know that he wants you to start a blog.
You should start a blog. Having your own little corner of the internet is good for the soul!
He also wants you to know that it’s mostly about the journey,
… blogging doesn’t have to be about unique insights. The value is in writing frequently and having something to show for it over time—worthwhile even if you don’t attract much of an audience (or any audience at all).
To help people get started, he describes three kinds of low stakes / high value posts.
- things I learned
- project descriptions
- things I found
The third kind of post, “things I found”, are what make up a link blog. They consist of a link to something interesting along with a bit of commentary. They can serve as a personal log for the link blog author, but they can also introduce the material to others.
I wish people would post more links to interesting things
I feel like Twitter and LinkedIn and Instagram and TikTok have pushed a lot of people out of the habit of doing that, by penalizing shared links in the various “algorithms”
Bluesky doesn’t have that misfeature, thankfully!
(In my ideal world everyone would get their own link blog too, but sharing links on Bluesky and Mastodon is almost as good)
Ideal world challenge accepted! You’ll be able to identify my “thing i found” posts by the [tif] prefix in their title and the tif tag.