Blogging every day

Matt Mullenweg on being challenged to blog every day:

"I thought blogging every day would be a burden, but it actually became a great source of joy. It was more a shift in mindset than anything — every day I read things I think are interesting, share links with friends, have thoughts that are 80% of a blog post, and write a ton privately, it was just a matter of catching those moments and turning them into something that was shared with the world."

Whenever I get out of the habit of writing daily, it creates friction to get anything published. When you post every day, there’s no expectation that all posts have to be great. But when you wait too long, there’s an increasing feeling that the next post has to be perfect.

Tools that make writing effortless — like Twitter’s limited, fast UI — should be part of the next generation of blogging software. I think that’s going to be around microblogs. Just because traditional blogs initially failed to embrace microblogging doesn’t mean we can’t take that format back with better server apps and clients.

When people first started paying attention to Twitter, the criticism was that no one cared “what you had for breakfast”. But if you look at some of my earliest posts on this weblog, many are equally trivial. What appears unremarkable today — the first lunch you had with co-workers at a brand new job, the stop at REI to get a tent for an upcoming family campout, the missed flight on the way to a great conference — might carry important meaning in later years, looking back. It hurts the web to keep that locked in a silo.

Manton Reece @manton