500 Posts: Failing in Public
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#posts #metaThis is my five hundredth post on this website. I've had this site since 2016 in various forms. During that time, it's become one of the most valuable things I've done.
Initially I thought it would be a good place to share my writing and promote myself as a writer. Well, no one really visits websites any more. Instead, it's evolved to become more of a personal site I can publish to when I want.
The main benefit is to have a space that I own where I can continually fail in public. I can try things out, publish them to this site and move onto the next thing. Most things I write may not be brilliant or I may reconsider later, but the constant churn of poems and ideas keeps me pushing forward. I fail constantly in public and then move on. It's this forward momentum that keeps me trying to make new things.
It's also quite gratifying to see the archives grow. I never really had an aim to reach a certain number of posts but five hundred seems like a reasonable milestone. Throwing things into the archive leaves a big old pile of stuff I can pull from. Ideas for longer works start from blog posts, a post from years ago might spark something new.
Owning the platform is also useful. Social networks rise and fall all the time. In the time I've had this site Twitter fell apart. When I deleted my account, I deleted everything I had written there. I downloaded the archive, but it was in an unfriendly format. On this site, I own my writing and am able to do what I want with it. Its a series of markdown files Im able to back up easily and port to a new provoder if I want. I'm no longer at the whim of fascist leaning billionaires (apart from the fine people who host the site of course). The site is a stable platform admist the broiling chaos.
So I'm glad to have reached five hundred posts. I'm going to continue to build this site and add more to it. I like digging into the idea of a personal website more. Here's to the next five hundred.
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