This blog post provides perspectives on why I blog.
Updated: Moved to:
The image for this post shows decreasing traffic to my blog over time. Maybe my older content (mostly about C#, .NET, headless CMS, and enterprise orchestration engines) is less relevent now than it was even a year ago, but I think that another factor may be people using LLMs more and searching less.
This relates to a previous post about how and why I use social media:
About fifteen years ago, I started blogging about technology for a few main reasons:
- I like to share knowledge and perspectives with others with hope that it could benefit them.
- I benefit from feedback regarding my ideas.
- My memory is terrible. It’s often easier for me to find things on the internet or on my blog than in my own mind.
- I was frequently answering the same questions repeatedly and it was easier to write a blog post and respond with a link than to answer each question each time.
- If you post on the Internet, that host owns your content. You cannot control it; they can do whatever they want with your content, including deleting it. They can even lock you out of the system. When I put things on sites controlled by other individuals and organizations, those things would sometimes disappear. Since then, I have lost more than 10,000 forum posts, and migration of my blogs hosted on systems that I do not control have suffered various challenges such as changed URLs and broken links.
- Using my blog, I don’t have to conform to any policy to avoid censorship or be manipulated by any algorithm (excluding SEO and AI) to get my content to appear.
One thing I found from blogging is that people are relatively forgiving of typos, grammatical errors, and things like that in blog posts. Another is that relatively few readers interact with blog posts at all. I have one post with more than 100,000 views – from literally almost every country in the world – but only 140 comments and 16 likes.
I didn’t realize it, but over time, my blog started bringing 25% to 50% of attributable traffic to the marketing site for the company where I worked. Due to the fact that this content was mostly relevant post-sale, I doubt that this drove any sales, so I don’t know why people were clicking those links.
Now, I don’t actually blog, and I don’t monetize any content or market anything or anyone. I write markdown into files in a github project that I push to github. What appears as blog posts are actually early drafts of a repository of my writings, some of which I hope to shape into a book. I promote those blog posts on LinkedIn, which generates a bit more traffic than those posts would get solely from WordPress readers and Internet search engines. Again, my goal in driving traffic is to get feedback via comments, but this is relatively rare. I also see my traffic declining over time, so I wonder how LLMs use my content, or if the content that I have published and for which people search is just less relevant or even obsolete these days.
This allows me to edit my content locally in LibreOffice and VSCodium so that I can spend minimal time in the WordPress editor, which is absolutely one of the worst pieces of software ever written. Additionally, I have both local and hosted (github) archives of my work for when I eventually stop paying WordPress. The github repository is private, but I can share it with anyone that might be interested, and I have given my brother instructions for how to access it if something happens to me.
The main reasons why I write at all are for my children:
- So that I can give them any advice and life lessons that could possibly benefit them based on my experiences.
- So that they have a better reminder of me after I’m gone.
Additionally:
- Writing, and especially blogging, is basically the only significant thing that I’ve done for at least the last 15 years. Without it, I probably wouldn’t know what to do and seem to lose purpose.
- I treat blogging as a form of journaling, which is a healthy activity, especially relative to doomscrolling or letting the algorithms otherwise control me.
See also:
I consider myself to be something of a systems theorist. Some of my interests include:
- Nature
- Mountain, motorcycling, and sailing
- Books and writing
- Music
- Education
- Logic and critical thinking
- Game theory
- Current events
- Business
- Perpetual growth
- Politics
- Finance, especially investment
- Psychology, especially human and pathology development
- Philosophy, including world religions and spirituality
- Values, ethics, and virtues
- Biohacking
- Media and technology/Internet/social media/AI literacy
- Technology, especially the intersection of technology with human psychology, and including productivity and tooling (especially for developers), nowadays including social media, gamification, and “AI”.
deliverystack.net 
I wrote a few more notes on this topic in response to a comment on the following thread. I guess the topic is more like “why do I write”, where the blog is just a channel.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/johnwest3_blogged-%F0%9D%98%BC%F0%9D%99%84-%F0%9D%99%8F%F0%9D%99%9A%F0%9D%99%A7%F0%9D%99%A2%F0%9D%99%9E%F0%9D%99%A3%F0%9D%99%A1%F0%9D%99%A4%F0%9D%99%9C%F0%9D%99%AE-%F0%9D%99%96%F0%9D%99%A3%F0%9D%99%99-activity-7401457903653826560-FTFm
That thread is about this post:
https://deliverystack.net/2025/12/01/ai-terminlogy-and-concepts-cheat-sheet/
Here is part of my response:
I have studied developmental psychology and child development and have worked as a developer, an instructor, and a technical writer. I have a strong interest in developer productivity, which often depends on tooling including things like language choices, development environment and tools (now including AI), and DevOps infrastructure. Different people learn best in different ways. Some watch or read (visual learners), some listen (auditory learners), some feel (tactile learners). I think everyone learns best when they do, which adds experience to their information input. I guess I am somewhat tactile in that I seem to remember things I’ve typed, but I much prefer text to video because I can scan without wasting time, and it’s easier to find my place on returning from other activities or thoughts. In this specific case, there was a great deal of information to process, which takes time and can feel like information overload. The result seems remarkably simple relative to the breadth of subject matter, though I’m sure that someone with more knowledge and skill could do a better job at it. I always try to get as much value as possible from a single investment. Anything in my head only has value to me, but if I share it with others, it can have much more value. Personally, I think we learn best when we take that personal time to learn, and especially when we get to do something with our learning. Many people are too busy to make the investment until it’s absolutely necessary, which isn’t always the optimal approach. Unfortunately, it’s too easy to avoid learning due to endless distractions and competing priorities. Hopefully the cheat sheet will get the information into more heads that wouldn’t have it otherwise, and more people will at least know something about the scope and what topics they might want or need to research further.
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