Blogging: Weekly Summary (December 01-7, 2025)

I kept coming back to the same few ideas this week. Some posts were like short postcards — quick, tidy updates. Others read like someone chatting in the kitchen at midnight, half theory, half confession. I would describe this week's blogging chatter as quietly practical, sometimes a bit nostalgic, and occasionally stubborn about doing things the old way. To me, it feels like a neighbourhood where half the people are fixing their fences and the other half are deciding whether to open a café. You can smell the bread and the paint at the same time.

Threads I kept noticing

There are a few recurrent threads across these posts. They show up in different clothes, but you see the same bones: quality vs. quantity, platform choices and migrations, the tension between public attention and private writing, and experiments with habit and failure. I’d say the tone is less “how to blow up” and more “how to keep going without losing your mind.”

• Quality over quantity. That pops up in a few places. Bobbie talks about stepping away and returning with less noise and more thought. Juha-Matti Santala argues that writing for yourself, not an audience, is powerful. And others who did daily posts (more on them in a bit) realized quantity can be a trap if you lose the reason you write.

• Platforms and migrations. There’s a quiet but steady stream of posts about moving between tools: WriteFreely to Ghost, themes for Bear Blog, Ghost as a membership platform, ActivityPub mentions, the usual tinkering. It’s funny how many people compare a new CMS move to moving house — because it is, often literally.

• Community, indie events, and belonging. The IndieWeb camp announcement and several weeknotes show people still care about meeting in person, swapping tips, and working together. That communal impulse keeps bubbling up even though so much of blogging feels solitary.

• Experiments in practice. Some posts are test cases: thirty-day blogging, abstaining from alcohol while blogging, deliberately submitting a short post to see what failure looks like. People are trying things, failing gently, and learning.

You’ll see these themes in small ways across the set, which makes the week feel coherent even though the posts are all over the map.

The slower, careful return — thinking about pauses and quality

Bobbie wrote about taking a break. The post isn’t dramatic. It’s practical. A job change, a move, life stuff — then the choice to stop pushing content just for the sake of pushing content. I would describe that sentiment as a relief, oddly enough. There’s a small cultural moment here: more folks are admitting that steady output is not the same as steady value.

That idea echoes in Juha-Matti Santala, who says write for yourself. He isn’t saying never think of readers. He’s saying that when the writing is for the writer first, it gets better as a tool — a notebook that other people can peep into. To me, it feels like cleaning out a junk drawer. You do it for the good of the drawer, but the neighbour might notice and say “nice.” The point is the drawer is useful whether or not the neighbour compliments you.

You get the same logic from reflections about daily posting. The exhilaration of doing a post every day is real, but several authors found it revealing. It forces priorities. It exposes what you really care to write. Sometimes that’s gold. Sometimes it’s filler.

The daily-post experiments: what happens when you post every day

This week had a cluster of reflections on thirty-day streaks. @HumanInvariant and Justis Mills both looked back at months of heavy posting. Angadh Nanjangud paired a thirty-day blogging streak with a thirty-day alcohol abstinence challenge and came away with a sharper point: abstaining was easier than blogging.

That last line made me smile. Abstaining is binary. Either you drink or you don’t. Blogging daily has messy thresholds. You can write garbage or you can write gold. You can do the habit superficially. The posts capture that mess nicely. Justis Mills found that the practice changed some topics. Parenting and personal feelings came to the surface more often. The author was surprised by which pieces landed and which didn’t.

There’s a practical tension here. Daily posting is good practice. It builds discipline and sometimes good work. But it also pressures you toward surface takes. You end up with more raw material, yes, but not necessarily more finished pieces. Several writers admit that they felt the pressure to produce, and they question whether the deadline helped or hurt the soul of the piece.

Failure as experiment: an odd read on messing up on purpose

One post stood out as a deliberate provocation. Drawn In Perspective wrote about trying to fail in a residency by submitting something under 500 words, and then watching the consequences. The piece isn’t a tantrum. It’s a tiny philosophy lesson about authorship, community norms, and what it means to fail publicly.

That’s the kind of post that makes you squint. It’s not instructive in the usual sense. It’s more like someone dropping a pebble into a quiet pond to see the ripples. The author watches the ripples and then tells you which fish got startled.

Platforms, plugins, and the tech itch

If you’re the kind of person who likes to tinker, enjoy the migration and CMS chatter. Andre Franca walks through a migration from WriteFreely to GhostCMS. He underestimated the migration work (who hasn’t?) and got hit by theme bloat and small incompatibilities. But he also found things he liked about Ghost: better ActivityPub integration, nicer email delivery, and a more robust editor.

Then there’s the short, useful overview from GreyCoder on Ghost as a membership-publishing platform. It’s concise and clear: Ghost gives you a clean editor, built-in newsletters, and the option of self-hosting. The idea of 0% platform fees for paid subscriptions is tasty if you’re trying to own your work and earn directly from readers.

It felt a bit like a farmer choosing which tool to chop wood with. Ghost is the new axe. WriteFreely was the hand-saw. People are making trades based on what they value — simplicity, control, email integration, and ActivityPub support. You can pick an axe or a saw depending on how many shingles you need to remove.

Related: GreyCoder and Andre Franca are basically arguing adjacent cases. One is saying “if you want membership, Ghost is purpose-built.” The other is saying “migrating is work but it can pay off.” The posts together feel like two neighbours comparing tools at the hardware store.

Ownership, discovery, and “let people find your website”

Some posts make a quiet plea for sites that are discoverable outside social media. Seth Werkheiser wrote a practical case where adding a blog to a client site opened doors. It’s one of those simple stories that hits you sideways — someone who didn’t use socials got found because the blog was there.

That squares with Colin Devroe talking through Elizabeth Spiers’ idea that blogs are like houses and social feeds are like a town square. To me, that’s a neat comparison. The house takes effort to visit. You have to care a bit to cross the threshold. The town square is noisy and cheap to visit. Both have value, but they aren’t interchangeable.

There’s also tech work towards decentralization — ActivityPub, IndieWeb camps — that quietly points toward a future where you control your address book and not a giant algorithm. The IndieWeb Camp announcement from Joe Crawford reads like a friendly reminder that people still meet and build together. If you want to poke at the future of personal publishing, those camps are where the tinkerers gather.

Nostalgia and a sense that blogging changed

A few posts were unabashedly nostalgic. Askmike.org and Ruben Schade both looked back at the early, more decentralized web and wondered whether blogging as we knew it is a fading art. The argument is simple: social platforms prioritize attention and churn, while blogs encourage longer form and slower thinking.

There’s some sadness there, but not exactly defeat. More like: the village pub closed on Thursdays, but people still drink at each other’s kitchens. People talk about paywalls and gated content, and the oddness of quality being moved behind subscription walls. It’s not a single villain. It’s a messy ecosystem where creators have to make choices.

Weekly life writing and weeknotes — the small human stuff

There are several weeknotes, monthly reports, and small domestic posts this week that made the set feel very human. Tracy Durnell covers mammograms, cat vet visits, and meals. Jeremy Cherfas writes about travel and Raspberry Pi projects. Rabbit Cavern shares leftover content like someone offering plate scraps after Sunday dinner.

These posts don’t try to teach. They record. They are reminders that much of blogging remains rooted in tiny, real life things. The small details add up. You find a theme about home maintenance, health, small pleasures, and the quiet craft of writing itself.

Aesthetics, holidays, and the little design bits

Holiday themes, gift guides, and a Christmas theme for Bear Blog show the softer side of blogging: presentation counts. ReedyBear provides a Christmas theme and sternly reminds to back up your theme. That’s practical advice wrapped in seasonal cheer.

Wouter Groeneveld writes about games, gift ideas, and the commercialization of holidays. Somewhere between recommendations and critique, there’s a very common pattern: bloggers use holidays as both content and as an excuse to tweak design.

Platform decline and the fate of old standing sites

One of the more curious posts looked at what happened to Problogger and Darren Rowse. John Lampard notes the site hasn’t posted since June 2024, and Rowse’s move into church work muddies the future. There’s a melancholy practicality to this: when big resources go quiet, smaller creators need to be ready to teach each other what those larger platforms used to teach.

It’s like watching a main street shop close. You miss it, but someone else will open a bakery in that slot — or maybe it’ll just stay empty for a while. Either way, it forces a local reorganization.

Small experiments and thinking about text types

daveverse wrote a thoughtful piece about “flip switches” — switching views for the same data — and argued that comments could have the same functionality as posts. The idea is simple but useful: allow people to toggle perspectives, outlines vs. graphics, long vs. short. It’s the kind of small UX idea that changes how you write because it changes how people read.

In a similar vein, Chris Hannah listed where he writes on the internet and how different blogs serve different functions: serious, casual, technical. That’s the kind of housekeeping post I always like. It helps me map an author’s intentions and know where to find the sort of thing I want.

Odd, lovely outliers

• Drawn In Perspective forcing a failure — that piece is a neat exercise in asking what authorship means.

• Angadh Nanjangud pairing habit experiments with blogging is a practical meditation that I suspect many will try to copy.

• The Wallflower Digest gives the seasonal personal notes that feel like a warm scarf; practical, small, and quietly specific.

These pieces don’t aim to be trend pieces. They are local, small, and precise. That makes them useful in a way that guides and listicles are not.

Recurring agreements and mild disagreements

There’s a surprising amount of agreement this week. Most writers lean toward valuing durable writing. They like owned spaces. They distrust pure social feeds for depth. They also largely agree that moving platforms is more work than you estimate.

Where authors diverge is on tactics. Some embrace daily posting as a discipline. Others retreat from it. Some want the features Ghost offers. Others are loyal to lightweight systems. Some feel nostalgia for the old web. Others want to mix modern membership tools with the old ideals of ownership.

It all reads like a polite town council meeting. Folks argue about paint colours and whether the new bakery should sell sourdough or croissants. Nobody is calling the other person a fool. They simply prefer different ovens.

Practical takeaways (tiny, actionable bites)

You don’t need a manifesto here. Just a few small, useful bits that keep coming back in the posts:

• If you’re moving platforms, budget at least twice the time you think it will take. Themes, migrations, and tiny edge cases take ages.
• Daily posting will teach you what you really want to write, but it will also reveal what you don’t want to write. That’s not failure; it’s feedback.
• If you want to be found, put content on your site. People still find blogs via search and links, even if social media is loud.
• If you care about ownership and memberships, Ghost is a sensible tool to evaluate. If you want minimalism, WriteFreely has charm — but it has limits.
• Keep backups. ReedyBear wasn’t joking about themes.

None of this is rocket science. It’s more like kitchen sense. It’s the stuff you learn from being clumsy once and deciding to tie your shoelaces differently.

Where to read deeper

If a line above hooked you, most of these posts deserve a slow coffee and a click. Bobbie for the thoughtful pause. Andre Franca for migration war stories. GreyCoder for a compact Ghost primer. Drawn In Perspective if you like philosophical mischief. Joe Crawford if you’re thinking of showing up at IndieWeb camp and want to hash out practical projects in person.

I’d say the week’s writing is best read like a small market: wander, sample, and be ready to buy something unexpected. There are essays that demand attention and others that are like a neighbour passing a jar of jam. Both are useful.

There’s a thread of care running through the posts — care for craft, care for readers, care for the small architecture of publishing. It’s not loudly declared. It’s more of a hum, a background radio station that you notice once or twice and then keep hearing.

If you want the dramatic forecasting about blogging’s death or rebirth, you’ll find hints but not fireworks. Most of these writers are less interested in tsunamis and more interested in how to patch the roof, bake another loaf, and keep the porch light on. That strikes me as sensible. Read the posts if you want the specifics. There’s useful work in the small places.