Hi Simon, how do you decide when to blog on your personal website vs something like substack? Do you post identical articles on both? Do you prefer one or the other?

My Substack newsletter is literally a copy and paste from my blog - I built a custom tool for it: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/4/substack-observable/

Everything substantial I write goes on my blog.

The one challenge I'm having at the moment is where to put short "thoughts" that aren't accompanied by a link. I used to use Twitter for those, but now I'm cross-posting to Bluesky and Mastodon and Twitter - but cross-posting a "thought" doesn't feel great.

Things like this: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3lko5bg3c4s2...

I may have to invent a fourth content type for my blog (which is currently just entries, bookmarks or quotes) for this kind of very-short-form post with no link. Molly White started doing that recently so I may borrow her design: https://www.mollywhite.net/micro

... with the help of Gemini 2.5 I added that new content type to my blog. I've called them "notes": https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/26/notes/

Do you have any idea whether Substack drives traffic to, or sucks traffic from, your blog?

No idea at all. My blog does really well on Google, so I think if either site is being penalized for duplicate content it's probably the Substack.

It looks like 8% of my newsletter signups are "from the app" according to the Substack dashboard - which I think is how they show signups that they've encouraged as opposed to signups I had myself.

I'm really just using Substack because they've solved email deliverability and they're free for me to use to send out emails.

If you have a blog with RSS and just need something that auto-emails people your updates you can run my project on a raspberry pi. No need to tie yourself into the substack ecosystem if you don't want to

[0] https://github.com/MattSayar/rsspberry2email

I've lost track of how many old projects I can barely remember because I didn't capture how they looked or worked

I'm not the type to write a blog. I just don't want to invest that much.

What I do though is documenting for myself, everything.

It has helped me greatly in the last few years

Do you have examples of how it helped?

I'm regularly kicking myself for not doing that, so I see the value, but some concrete examples might help my motivation.

If you're regularly kicking yourself, don't you have your own examples to draw from? Only half-joking.

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

> 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.

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.

Hey, I'm glad that my comment helped somewhat. Expanding on the scaffolding bit, I'm using the most minimal tools I can use, since they don't let me do (very) fancy things, I can't spend time needlessly adjusting things. A single, markdown aware, automatically theme changing blog space is enough for me. No fancy things, just text, plus RSS.

People can follow and share. That's enough. Even the webpages doesn't have any JS.

Thanks! I’m in a very similar situation as far as simplicity goes. This conversation has helped me in finishing my latest article: https://aneksteind.github.io/posts/2025-03-26

"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.

I would love to do this as well, but I'm put off by the time it would take away from pushing the project itself forward. How much time does it generally take for you to make a blogpost for a project?

It can be as little as 10 minutes for smaller projects, partly because I have so much practice writing them up now.

Here are two recent examples where I mostly just quoted my release notes and added a tiny bit of extra flavor:

- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/28/strip-tags/

- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/19/files-to-prompt/

This gets much easier with practice. One exercise that that worked for me was to force myself to share anything (projects, til, ideas, experiments, advice) daily for 111 days. Then scale down.

Compare untested.sonnet.io and sonnet.io/projects

The latter took 10 years to have a list of projects. With the former, there’s almost no friction, although I have spikes and slower periods.

Also, people appreciate people who share and talk about their work, and that can lower the bar for things like correct grammar/vocab/clear structure.

To improve my overall fluency I made a writing tool that separates editing from writing: enso.sonnet.io.

Another thing that can work well are weekly updates/summaries. But this gets harder if you struggle with building habits and prefer shorter feedback loops.

PS. I'm not at Simon's level here although he is one of my inspirations - my main untested feed posts take 1-2 hours minimum, the smaller notes/branches can be < 20 min.

PPS. I'm working on a short list of actionable tips / places to share work. Hit me up via email and I'll send it over when it's done.

Five paragraphs, about an hour or less. Don't overthink it. Below are some examples from my woodworking, but I think they illustrate the concept. The important thing to remember is the blog post is not the project: it is a very quick overview pointing readers to the project. Built up over time, these quick overviews add up to a longer representation of your body of work, which you can use to sell yourself.

https://www.aechairs.com/2025/01/15/black-side-chair/

https://www.aechairs.com/2024/10/15/painting-chairs-with-mil...

These are fantastic, I've been contemplating getting into woodworking and I love these as examples of project writeups.

My rabbit hole started here 7 years ago and I'm still digging: https://lostartpress.com/collections/design/products/the-ana... You've been warned ;)

Beautiful pieces of furniture. Thank You!

> if I do a project, the price of doing that project is that I have to write about it.

Definitely something I need to do. I've been meaning to do a "what I did in 2024" blog post but since I didn't keep track, trying to figure it out has postponed the post for 3 months already...

I'd suggest a smaller scope, as writing for a whole year can be a bit of a daunting task.

I second this. Small chunks is easier than one massive thing all at once.

I also have the habit of keeping a `~/notes.md` file, which I can access at the drop of a hat with a shell shortcut (I use fish, so I have the function `nn` which calls `$EDITOR ~/notes.md`). If you use multiple computers, which I do, you can use a common git repo with a branch for each computer as a backup. I generally end up writing a few notes every day, which means if I want to publish something in the future I have good source material to use.

Apologies if this post was a bit self centered, I hope my sharing my methods might be useful :)

> I also have the habit of keeping a `~/notes.md` file

Oh, I did spin up a Honk instance to keep notes on "things-i-did". It ... does not have many posts (83 since 2022-05). Ironically it doesn't have "set up honk instance for note-taking" in there.

But the `notes.md`+`git` idea might work. Although I know the first time I get a conflict on the `pull`, it'll all fall down...

Agreed. I find for myself, for a blog post that is about something else I've done, the ideal length is about 5 paragraphs and it should take no more than an hour to write. Longer than that and it just doesn't get done, or it should be considered a project unto itself and should be managed as such with dedicated time set aside for it. Writing about everything I did in year would be a lot longer than 5 paragraphs, which means I need to break the concept down (perhaps into months, or write something per-project instead).

I like your diligency, thats pretty impressive track record. Although I need to point out a little readability issue: For me (likely ADHD) your blog is very hard to visually parse. It looks like single wall of unstructured text. It's hard to see where one post ends and where another one begins. The strongly emphasized links inside the content itself does not help. You have a lot of whitespace on left and right, but almost none in vertical direction and there is little use of font sizes. In the end every element seems the same importance. I see that you don't want to overdo with styling, which is fine, but a little more styling here and there could go a long way to help people get around.

Hey Simon, love your work. I also appreciate the fact that you've been so approachable to ask questions of. (I've talked to you on one of the socials)

Just a random question for you. Of all of the projects you've created, which is your favorite?

It's https://datasette.io - I'm still having so much fun with it, especially since any idea I want to experiment with can be justified as a Datasette plugin!

I get it, but I have reservations.

A random example on Youtube "I will tidy up your garden for free". They do that based on the income they get from writing/videoing about it, mainly from big tech algos. If everyone did it, that monetary value is lost from the explaining of it.

It's taking advantage of a curve for self-advantage which you're aware of which is fine, but doesn't really provide value in productivity in the broadest sense. What if everyone blogged about their work? As in literally everyone.

"What if everyone blogged about their work? As in literally everyone."

That would be great. This isn't a zero sum game - what's important is that each individual has an opportunity to document their work, look back on it in the future and occasionally show it to interested people.

Does the web really work that way though?

Maybe it does for your historical reference example, like a CV. If we presumed that those pages with that content would get any traction at all.

Generally the way it's working is people continually pump out content, big tech algos surface it to other people and within a few days those pages don't receive any visitors at all.

If you have a great channel where people see that link, great. But most information discovery is via the big tech algos.

> and within a few days those pages don't receive any visitors at all.

I think you're maybe talking about publishing things for different reasons, the quoted part kind of gives me that impression.

If the point is to get as many visitors as possible then yeah, just pumping out MVPs/concepts/hacks/prototypes might not be the best idea. But if your reasons are different, the amount of visitors might not even matter.

As many visitors as possible, not really. Just a channel where you may get interested visitors.

The point isn't about pumping out content to please the algorithms, it is that the algorithms prefer that constant churn of it, and it's overwhelmingly the method of information discovery on the web.

If the only viewer of my blog posts is myself (and often times it is), then I'd still keep writing if only just to keep a public journal of my thought process and things that I accomplished at certain times in my life.

Same here.

to be fair, that could be called a diary. I would guess the average person thinking about publishing in public thinks about other people seeing it.

Also fair, but most of the time the other people are a few close friends. I'm not trying to keep it a secret like a diary but I'm also not trying to get incredibly popular like a content creator or famous blogger.