Tag: Blogging

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Splitting sites

Today, I surgically removed zonker.net from WordPress.com and co-hosting with Dissocated Press to have a cleaner split between personal and “professional” topics.  The next step will be figuring out what blogging software I want to use for Dissociated Press for the next 20 years or so and start self-hosting it again as well.

I don’t do a lot of blogging on Dissociated Press these days, since I spend most of my time writing about open source for LWN.net, but I’ve never been 100% comfortable mingling personal topics with posts meant for a much wider audience. Not that Dissociated Press gets millions of page views, but…

Anyway, I hope to pick up the pace of blogging here about random things that don’t fit for LWN.net and are too long or less ephemeral than what I put up on Mastodon.

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Making things vs. making the best things

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.

Especially on a personal blog, there’s no reason things need to be perfect. While it’d be nice if everything I wrote was perfect, it doesn’t need to be. Mainly I want to get some thoughts out of my head (too many in there anyway) and maybe start some conversations.

Maybe I’ll give somebody else an idea, maybe I’ll get a comment that teaches me something or helps me think about something a different way. Mostly? I just enjoy writing when I get out of my own way and do it. I hope others enjoy it as well. If not, well, it’s not like they made a major investment to get it.

I know for a fact I enjoy having completed something, even something imperfect, more than I like looking at something unfinished or having nothing to show for perfectionism.