turoczy

I've written on various blogs, including my own, since the late 90s, but I have been blogging consistently on a single instance for a little over 17 years. I've seen my writing shift from long form to rapid fire and back again.

I've also noticed that it's become mostly formulaic, as a way of dispersing information to folks. But it's those rare occasions where I'm actually struck with the inspiration to write a longer form thought piece that really brings me back to the whole reason I started my current blog.

Again, super happy to read this piece and the comments here. I'll remain hopeful that it inspires others to start — or to return to — blogging. It's really an incredible means of communicating with one another.

Like many here, I turned off commenting years ago. My motivation had less to do with spam. (I'm on WordPress and it does a pretty good job with that.) It had more to do with the conversations moving from my site to the social web. Folks wanted to talk about stuff where they already were, rather than centralizing that conversation on individual blogs.

(As an aside, I rarely participated in those comment threads on my blog. I always saw them as a place for others to talk about a post. I'd already had my chance to say my piece. So the comments had less value to me, personally, but seemed to have value to the folks reading my blog. All to say that I wasn't really driving engagement with the comments. I was just letting them do what they were doing.)

I tried a few of those "commenting" solutions that attempted to pull the social channels into the blog itself, but they never seemed to recreate that 2005-2010 dynamic of active and engaging conversations occurring on a single post.

It's also worth noting that, in my experience, a big motivator for many platforms had to do with driving pageviews. And once commenting stopped doing that, folks seemed to lose interest in continuing to offer that functionality.

If folks have questions, comments, or edits, please feel free to post here, submit an issue on Github, or submit a pull request.

I hesitated to respond because it's not exactly awesome. But for anyone interested in what's happening in the Portland, Oregon, startup community, it's +12 years of content in that regard. Written mostly by me. Who happens to be a human on a regular basis. A human with bad grammar.

Also, people so rarely ask about blogs anymore that I was compelled to respond. So thank you.