[davidanekstein]

Do you have any advice for someone like me, who has about 5 long form article ideas but would like to just get stuff out there? For example, I want to blog about matrix profiles because I just learned about them and they’re super cool. But it feels like much scaffolding needs to occur for an audience to see the light.

As an example of the type of length my blogposts have: https://aneksteind.github.io/posts2022-03-04/index.html

[bayindirh]

> But it feels like much scaffolding needs to occur for an audience to see the light.

tl;dr: Don't think about others. Just write, put it out there, with a couple of stickers pointing people. They'll see and come.

I'd not care about scaffolding, actually. I have three main outlets for what I do: Blog, Digital Garden, Mastodon, and arguably here.

Blog was meant to be technical, but instead it became a "life" blog. My digital garden is where my technical notes are, and where my project write-ups will be, and Mastodon and here is what I post links to these spaces.

My secret is, I don't write these for anybody. The format is for general consumption, but I'm not sad because nobody gives feedback about it or reaches me about these things. I generally do these for my enjoyment, and blog analytics show that there's some foot traffic in my blog. Digital garden keeps no analytics.

When you put it out there, can point people to what you do, people will start to come. Not in hoards, but in small groups, and that's enough IMHO. Otherwise you need to be your blog's servant to drive the numbers up.

I'm not playing that game.

[davidanekstein]

Thanks for the reminder. I feel the same way about not playing the game. Moreso than wanting to drive the numbers up, which is not the goal, I like sharing things and want to at least be coherent so that someone can follow along. But considering your advice I think not sweating the details of scaffolding is a good adjustment.

[simonw]

"My secret is, I don't write these for anybody. [...] When you put it out there, can point people to what you do, people will start to come."

That's absolutely the way to do this. Believe it or not that's still the way I think about my online writing.