Blogging: Weekly Summary (September 29 - October 05, 2025)

There’s been a quiet hum across a handful of personal blogs this week. Not loud, not viral, but the kind of chatter you’d overhear at a neighbourhood café — people swapping screens, swapping tools, swapping doubts and small victories. I would describe them as snapshots of a community still figuring out what staying small and deliberate looks like in 2025. To me, it feels like watching someone refit an old car in their driveway: a lot of hands-on work, a few cuss words, and the kind of pride that comes from making something usable again.

The tech shuffle: rebuilding, migrating, and the little wars with tooling

There’s a neat throughline of posts about switching stacks, rebuilding sites, and the low-level joys and pains of maintaining your own publishing setup.

Linus Arver talks about Lilac, renaming an old branch to lilac-legacy and preparing a fresh version. The post is part progress report, part manifesto: literate programming is preferred, but Orgmode and the surrounding tools aren’t doing everything the author wants. I’d say the tone there is pragmatic: excited about a reveal coming soon, worried about broken links later. That worry — links, redirects, the web as a messy archive — keeps turning up in other posts too.

Manu did a backend facelift while keeping the look mostly the same. New CSS rewrite, a fresh URL layout for interviews, better handling for wide screens. It’s the kind of change that won’t shock a casual reader, but it matters to the author and to anyone who tinkers: cleaner code that scales is a small, quiet victory. And later, Manu returns with a human-interest profile (Blake Watson) so you see a pattern: the same people who tidy their CSS also tell other people’s stories.

Then there’s the simple move to WordPress. Jack Baty posts twice about this — one short note about being “over at baty.blog for a bit” and another earlier, a general “Ah, blogging” where he confesses to bouts of fatigue from terminal life on Linux. The impression I got: sometimes you just want the toaster to toast. WordPress is that toaster: reliable, less fiddly, and full of little comforts like built-in commenting and theme switching. It’s not a betrayal, it’s a break. The migration experience is framed like swapping bicycles because your knees hurt — not glamorous, but sensible.

There’s also a developer’s lab note from Leon Mika about building a static site for podcast clip favourites using Blogging Tools and Hugo. It reads like someone speaking into a pocket recorder while soldering: tests, Git commits, small UX choices, audio thumbnails. It’s satisfying in a low-key way. If you like seeing the behind-the-scenes, these posts are the grease on the gears.

A short digression: moving platforms often wakes up deeper questions — who owns your content, how discoverable should you be, and how many hours do you want to waste chasing a CSS bug. You’ll see these questions pop up again.

The human side: ambitions, fatigue, and small acts of publishing

A strand of posts this week leaned into the emotional side of blogging. There’s a quiet honesty about why people keep writing, pause, hide, or come back.

Robert Birming writes about being haunted by ambitions. It’s not a dramatic confession. It’s more like someone admitting they overbaked a recipe because they were trying to impress. The piece talks about expectations turning writing into a chore. You can almost see the comments — gentle reminders — folded back into the post. The takeaway? Ambition can be a leash if you let it; the trick is to loosen it sometimes.

Anecdotal Evidence uses literary history — Chekhov and Pleshcheyev — to remind us that a blog can be that old pleasing genre: short essays, small truths, a bit messy. The post wants blogging to be a place for craft, not clickbait. I would describe them as pleading for dignity in informal writing. That’s the vibe: not a crusade, but a steady insistence that writing matters.

This day's portion goes the other direction with a hibernation story. The author pulls posts and links to limit findability. There’s a strange tension: wanting the freedom to vanish while also appreciating readers. To me, it feels like moving a plant from a windowsill to a darker shelf for a while. It’s protective, not permanent.

And then there’s the simple encouragement from riki's house: “Please write.” The tone is warm and pushy in the best way. Make drafts from your braindumps. Blog the messy first versions. The post acts like an old friend telling you to stop being precious. That nudge matters. It’s the sort of advice that gets ignored often, but when you take it, you learn a lot.

The emotional pieces in this batch are small, honest, and oddly comforting. They remind you that blogging is, at its core, a human habit — sometimes cosy, sometimes exhausting.

Longevity, reach, and the long tail problem

Several posts circle a big, awkward question: what is blogging for in a world of instant social updates?

Dries Buytaert argues for longevity. He’s left social feeds behind, finding more satisfaction in blog posts that persist and help people months or years later. The argument is plain: reach is flashy; persistence is useful. You can feel the preference for a steady map over fireworks.

John Collins riffs on the Long Tail. He frames blogging economics in Anderson’s terms: the web rewards niche work, but it can be lonely and financially unrewarding. Still, the freedom to focus on odd corners of taste and expertise is valuable. It’s not rich, but it’s free in a different sense.

And Doc Searls Weblog makes a pointed case for independence. Substack gets dragged into the conversation, mostly as a foil. The post insists blogging isn’t just another social app — it’s publishing. I’d say the post is stubborn in the best way: it wants the web to be a place where creators keep their keys.

Put these together and you see the debate: social platforms offer quick reach, but personal blogs offer depth and longevity. It’s like choosing between a loud megaphone and a bookshelf. Megaphones get you noticed; books keep you found.

Spam, AI, and unexpected headaches

Not everything is romantic. John Lampard writes about comment spammers using AI. After re-enabling comments, he sees a wave of incoherent, sometimes eerily plausible messages. The piece is part annoyance, part cautionary tale. These spammers are getting better at sounding real — which is also a little scary.

The drift here is practical: enabling comments means dealing with noise. It also raises questions about moderation, verification, and whether the comment section is still a convivial place or a battleground. There’s a small moral: enjoy comments if you want them, but keep a broom handy.

Personal profiles and accessibility — stories that matter

There’s a nicely paced profile from Manu about Blake Watson, a frontend engineer living with spinal muscular atrophy. Blake’s piece reads like a reminder of why personal sites still matter. His blog helped him get work. He talks about assistive tech, side projects like Dungeons & Dragons tools, and the cost of running a site. It’s a human story with technical guts. I’d describe it as quietly inspiring — not because it’s extraordinary, but because it’s ordinary work and ordinary life braided together.

This profile adds another layer to the conversation: blogging isn’t just vanity or theory. For some folks, it’s livelihood, identity, and accessibility combined. That makes the platform and its design choices feel less academic and more practical.

Style and craft: essays, short forms, and the moral obligation to readers

A few writers nudged the conversation toward craft.

Anecdotal Evidence again: the post about the ‘pleasing and often rewarding genre’ insists bloggers should keep quality in mind. It’s not elitist — it’s a nudge toward respect for the reader. The Chekhov reference makes the point with a wink: treat short pieces like small stories, not listicles dressed up as literature.

riki's house wants people to stop overthinking aesthetics. A rough draft is better than no draft. You polish later. That practical craft advice complements the higher-minded plea for dignity. One says write better now; the other says just write.

Small economies and monetisation talk

A few pieces addressed the money side, but softly. Blake's profile mentioned running costs and thoughtful monetisation. John Collins touched on the Long Tail economics. The tone across these posts is cautious: people want to be paid, or at least to break even, but they don’t want to sell out. Monetisation is framed as a necessary nuisance, not a goal in itself.

It’s like running a corner shop: you’d love more customers, but you don’t want to become a chain. The language is deliberately low-key — open about costs, skeptical of quick-money schemes, and curious about sustainable small models.

Agreement, friction, and recurring themes

Some things came up again and again. Not exactly consensus, but familiar echoes.

• Independence beats convenience as a value. People want to control their URLs and archives. See Doc Searls Weblog and Linus Arver. Both worry about lock-in and loss of control.
• Tools are a mixed blessing. Folks love Hugo, WordPress, or Lilac in theory, but complain about tooling gaps and fatigue. See Leon Mika, Linus Arver, and Jack Baty.
• Longevity matters. Multiple posts praise the slow, searchable, useful nature of blog posts. That’s in Dries Buytaert, riki's house, and the Long Tail piece by John Collins.
• Fatigue and ambition are twin complicators. You want to do great work, but sometimes you’re tired. Robert Birming and Jack Baty both voice forms of this.

There’s also tension: some want to hide (hibernate), others want to be found (SEO, better URLs), and some simply want comments to work. It’s not a contradiction so much as a list of trade-offs. That, to me, is the main story: blogging is a set of choices, each with a cost.

Little pleasures and tiny failures — the everyday texture

A lot of the week’s writing is about small things. New URL structures. A CSS rewrite. A tool called Wordland that someone tried. Spam that’s suddenly smarter. A podcast clips project that needed thumbnails and audio tags. These are not glamorous headlines. They are the nuts-and-bolts of keeping a site alive.

I’d say these posts collectively feel like a row of backyard sheds. Each one has different tools inside: one has a sledgehammer, another has delicate screwdrivers. Some sheds are tidy; some are cluttered. But every shed is useful.

There’s also a kind of repetition that’s comforting. People recommend writing messy drafts. People warn about platform lock-in. People celebrate small upgrades. You keep seeing the same small truths because they matter and because real projects live in the repetition.

Where the conversation might be heading next

If I were sketching a map of where this group’s thinking could go next (and I would describe them as busy testing the edges), several directions look likely:

• Better migration tools and smoother redirects. Broken links make people twitchy, and that’s a practical problem Linus and others are thinking about.
• More attention to accessibility and the cost of sites. Blake’s story nudges people toward thoughtful design for actual users.
• A new balance between social reach and archive-worthiness. People want both reach and longevity. The question is how much compromise will happen.
• Smarter comment moderation or fewer comments. Spam is evolving and comment sections will either get richer tools or become quiet again.

None of these are dramatic revelations. They’re incremental, stubborn, and practical. Like replacing a clutch — fiddly, necessary, and satisfying when it works.

A small invitation

If any of this nudges your curiosity, the posts are where the detail lives. There’s the expected tech chatter from Linus Arver and Leon Mika, the platform-moving practicality of Jack Baty, the encouragement from riki's house, and the reflective pieces from Dries Buytaert and Robert Birming. If you like human stories, Blake’s profile via Manu is worth a read. The spam piece from John Lampard is a good reality check if you’re thinking of opening comments again.

A small, slightly nagging point: these posts don’t pretend to hold the future of publishing. Instead, they each show one person, one patch of the internet, doing the work. That’s attractive in its own way. It’s like seeing neighbors fix fences — quiet, imperfect, and oddly social.

Dive in if you want the finer details. The links and the posts have the code snippets, the redirects, the CSS commits, and the personal lines that made me chuckle or nod. If you’re into tinkering, or recovering from platform fatigue, or thinking about making your own place on the web, there’s a week’s worth of small, useful reading waiting.