Blogging: Weekly Summary (December 15-21, 2025)

There was a lot of small, honest noise on the topic of blogging this week. It wasn't loud. It wasn't one big manifesto. It was more like a backyard of conversations — a few people fixing the fence, someone else making coffee, another person digging up old photos and realizing they need to move them to a safer shed. I would describe these posts as a cluster of practical moves, quiet confessions, and gentle wrenching changes. To me, it feels like watching people who have been doing this for years figure out what matters now.

Threads I kept seeing

One habit jumped out: repair and preservation. Not flashy reinvention. Real upkeep. Writers talked about saving their words, fixing titles, updating changelogs, and teaching a new AI helper how their site should behave. That came up in different tones — melancholy, cheerful, mildly annoyed — but the same underlying impulse: keep the work alive.

Then there was a quieter strand about identity — who counts as a writer, what a blog should be, how to make money or not. People circled the question like it was a kettle about to boil. And finally, there was attention to tools: code tweaks, RSS feeds, small UX fixes, and even hardware like a coffee brewer making an entry in a post about tone. It’s the mixture of the human and the mechanical that felt familiar. Like tuning an old car while arguing about the radio station.

Preservation and the small web

Dries Buytaert(/a/dries_buytaert@dri.es) wrote something that felt like both a practical how-to and a small elegy. His piece about exporting his nearly 20-year archive to GitHub is a plain, scary reminder: the internet is fragile. He compares websites to ancient manuscripts, which is a nice image. That line stuck. It made me picture dusty stacks in a library and a neglected WordPress install in the attic. He’s not dramatizing. He’s doing something sensible: independent copies, less dependence on someone else’s servers or an ever-ticking payment page. It reads like a decision made by someone who’s thought to themselves, “one day I won’t be here, but maybe this should.”

That very same mood — keeping the small web breathing — comes through when Joe Crawford(/a/joe_crawford@artlung.com) looks back at Blogger getting bought. He’s nostalgic in a way that isn’t cheesy. He remembers Pyra Labs and early PageRank days, and then he snaps a little: ads changed the taste. It’s like talking about how the neighborhood bakery used to give you a free cookie with coffee and now it won’t. His piece ties nicely to Dries’s: both are about the shifting roof above the things we write under.

Naked Capitalism(/a/naked_capitalism) marking its 19th birthday is in the same neighborhood of thought. It’s not a technical take. It’s a community story. They talk about storms weathered — big financial ones — and readers who kept the place going. It’s like a corner diner surviving two recessions because the regulars showed up. That sort of longevity makes the preservation moves feel urgent and not precious.

Small fixes, big feelings

There’s something oddly satisfying about a tiny fix made public. James' Coffee Blog(/a/james_coffeeblog@jamesg.blog) puts it plainly in “A small fix”: changing the HTML document title from a bland default to something that actually says what it is. The post is short and a little giddy. I’d say it’s the sort of thing people who work on their own sites cherish. It’s like tightening a loose doorknob in your house for no one else but you.

Andrew Marder(/a/andrew_marder) keeps a changelog. That’s not flashy, but it’s honest. The changelog feels like a visible breathing of the site — updates, corrections, things the writer fixed because they noticed, or a reader told them. Andrew’s listy, matter-of-fact tone balances the more philosophical posts. It’s practical. Very practical. Kind of like the person in a group project who actually types up the meeting notes.

Chris Hannah(/a/chris_hannah) wrote about hiring “Claude” as a junior developer, and I have to admit that sounded like a cheat at first. But his story is not about replacing a soul with silicon. It’s about using an assistant to do the small ongoing tasks — redesign bits, Open Graph images, RSS tweaks — that saps energy. To me, that feels like an admission: the freestanding blogger who wants to keep the site alive will use what works. Claude reduced friction, and that freed the writer to do other things. There’s a little moral wrinkle here about what gets outsourced and what you keep close. It’s worth reading to see the kinds of chores people let machines take over.

Writing, style, and the pressure to perform

A few posts took on the internal pressure to write “correctly.” James’ Coffee Blog also wrote “Words and making coffee”, which pairs the comforts of coffee-brewing with the awkwardness of trying to write serious stuff. He references Gretchen McCulloch and internet linguistics, then says, basically, that blogging can be lighter and still honest. That felt like permission. Like when your aunt says — stop ironing your T-shirt for the backyard barbecue. Stop worrying. Write.

Doc Searls(/a/docsearlsweblog@doc.searls.com) in “Satur Daze” traces his move from long-form essays to shorter, social-media-style snippets. He doesn’t seem defeated. More like liberated. And he says the change is about independence. For him, brevity isn’t a loss. It’s a different muscle. That’s a recurring argument in the week’s posts: blogging doesn’t have one right form.

Varun Raghu(/a/varunraghu) asks a blunt question: do you need to make money from your writing? His answer leans to the romantic side — keep writing for the love of it, if you can. He’s wary of the label “writer” becoming a job description that replaces joy. That sentiment echoed elsewhere, but Varun makes it personal without being preachy. This thread of resisting monetization came up again when Better than Random(/a/betterthan_random) documented how building an audience and a personal brand is messy, incremental, and often accidental.

Audience, algorithms, and the new weirdness

Greg Morris(/a/greg_morris) has a small howl about AI-driven traffic. He notices weird spikes from LLM-based search tools and points out a strange thing: you can get traffic without knowing the questions people asked. It’s the idea that a chatbot stands between you and readers and doesn’t tell you the score. The old analytics felt clunky but honest: someone searched, someone clicked. Now a piece of your writing can be quoted by a tool that never leaves a trail of the original query. That feels like a privacy and authorship riddle.

The question Greg raises is part curiosity and part suspicion. I’d say it’s the sort of thing that keeps people up if they rely on search for discovery. It’s also the sort of thing that can make writing feel oddly divorced from the reader. Like dropping a note in a bottle and never knowing who picked it up.

Experiments, stunts, and production runs

Linch Zhang(/a/linch_zhang@linch.substack.com) did something a lot of people dream about — writing 30 posts in 30 days. Their roundup is candid. Some posts hit, some didn’t, and the author is honest about the mix. They highlight odd little successes — board-game strategies, a new take on Rock Paper Scissors, an idea about vaccine deployment. The piece reads like the diary of someone sprinting a small marathon, then looking at the race photos and picking out the moments that matter. It’s encouraging and a little bruised. A good read if you like the sweat behind a creative burst.

Ruben Schade(/a/ruben_schade@rubenerd.com) starts a quick review column covering everything from coffee to Vim to FreeBSD 15. It’s brisk and doesn’t try to be exhaustive. The format is nice because it gives readers quick impressions — like asking a friend in the shop whether the thing is worth it. It’s a reminder that blogs are still good for short, opinionated takes.

Memoir, grief, and the human stuff

A number of authors used the blog not just as a technical playground, but as a place to feel things. daniel.industries in “They Are the Same” folds together burnout, existential searching, and the slow change of creative pursuits. The tone is reflective, heavy at times, and humble. It’s not a how-to. It’s someone admitting that the thing they loved started to feel thin, and they’re trying to stitch it back together.

Kathleen Fisher(/a/manu@manuelmoreale.com) writes about grief in Kansas City and how it reshaped her writing life. The post is quiet and personal. She talks about authenticity and the therapeutic aspect of putting words down. That kind of piece makes other posts about lists and code seem, well, practical by comparison. But it’s important. When a blog holds grief openly, it reminds the rest of us why we write in the first place — not for traffic, not for metrics, but because it helps. A small, tender patch of blogland.

The Wallflower Digest(/a/thewallflowerdigest) captures the week-before-Christmas jitter: sleep trouble, work pressure, a wedding album project, and a new notebook for drawing. It’s that domestic slice-of-life blogging that still feels like friends swapping stories across the fence. It’s personal in a way that’s easy to dip into and say, “oh yeah, me too.”

Building an audience and brand stuff

Better than Random(/a/betterthanrandom) tells a different tale. It’s about building a voice, a brand, and a mix of blog posts and speaking gigs. The author maps out milestones and a few key people who helped. There’s a lesson here: audience growth feels accidental and deliberate at the same time. You make some choices that matter and some that don’t. You meet people who will amplify you, and other times you have to shout alone for a while. The piece reads like a workshop recap that’s part memoir, part notes to self.

There’s a tension here that keeps showing up: should the blog be a labor of love or a platform? The writers split. Some resist monetization (Varun). Some accept workarounds and tools to keep things running (Chris). Some celebrate community as their lifeline (Naked Capitalism). It’s not a neat argument. It’s a slow argument. Like two neighbors deciding whether to repaint the fence or put solar panels up.

The tiny joys: coffee, tools, and ergonomics

Coffee shows up in a few places. James’ coffee posts are literal — a bit about a Kalita 155 Tsubame brewer and how design affects the way you make coffee. That falls into a pleasant corner of blogging where gear talk becomes metaphor talk. The brewer isn’t just a brewer. It’s an object lesson in craft and care. I’d say these posts remind readers that blogging is part craft, part ritual.

Rubenerd’s quick reviews include hardware like the Kensington Orbit Trackball. Those micro-reviews are like asking your cousin whether their new gadget is worth the money. They don’t overpromise. They tell you what works and what doesn’t. And that is exactly what the internet needs: fewer hot takes, more practical honesty.

Tiny governance: titles, tags, and RSS

A few posts are small and reassuring. “A small fix” (James) and Chris Hannah’s notes about auto-generating social images and cleaning RSS feeds are tiny governance moves. They aren’t sexy, but they’re important. They are the blog-world equivalent of replacing the house’s weather stripping — nobody celebrates it, but everything is a bit quieter and drier afterward.

I notice a pattern: once you’ve built something, the next phase is maintenance. The excitement fades into routine calls: update the tag, fix the title, make sure the images appear on Twitter and the feed works. It’s like owning a boat. The first year is sailing. Years later, it’s mostly about keeping the bilge pump working.

Disagreement and ambivalence

Most writers aren’t outraged. They’re reflective. You can see small disagreements in emphasis. Greg is suspicious of opaque AI traffic. Chris is pragmatic about using AI helpers. Varun is wary of monetization while Better than Random is obviously more strategic about brand building. Those are not firestorms of argument. They’re more like neighbors arguing about the best winter coat — each has a reason.

There’s also ambivalence about form. Doc Searls likes short bits now; others still value longer essays. Linch likes intense bursts of output; others write slowly. That variety is the point: blogs are not one thing. They are as many things as their authors.

What these posts point toward

If one were to stitch a common thread through the week, it might be this: blogs remain useful because they’re flexible. They hold grief and grammar tips. They are places for practice and for performance. They are a safe place to try a code fix, to put up a changelog, and to confess burnout. They are a place to test an assistant like Claude and decide whether that’s cheating or just evolution.

I’ll say it again plainly: preservation matters. That wasn’t a single whisper. It was multiple people, in different voices, doing different things with the same goal. Back up your content. Fix the metadata. Keep copies. It’s like having an extra key hidden under a pot plant. You hope you never need it, but you sleep better.

Also: writing without pressure is not only allowed, it’s a conscious choice for many. Varun’s preference for free writing and Kathleen’s use of blogging as therapy are reminders that the internet need not always be a market. It can be a garden. Or a garage where you keep some old tools and an old guitar, even if you never play in public again.

There’s a mild tension with new tech. AI tools both help and obscure. They make chores lighter and traffic stranger. People are figuring out policies in real time. Greg’s unease about invisibly channeled queries is worth a second thought. At the same time, Chris’s practical use of Claude shows that adoption can be humane and useful.

Finally, there’s craft. The practical posts — small fixes, changelogs, quick reviews, hardware notes — are the work nobody photographs for the front page. Yet they matter. They’re the nuts and bolts that keep the rest readable.

If any of this piques curiosity, the source posts are short and varied. Some are tender. Some are technical. Some are a bit cheeky. If you like stories about survival, read the anniversary and the grief pieces. If you want practical, check the changelogs and Claude write-ups. If you want the shape of a month-long experiment, Linch’s write-ups are worth a look.

There’s a warmth to this week’s blogging that’s easy to miss if one only watches the big platforms. It’s the small web repairing itself, one commit and one cup of coffee at a time. It’s people deciding how to keep their things alive, and how to keep writing when it’s easier not to. It’s a neighbor fixing a fence, another making a pie, and a third trying a new tool to mow the lawn faster. It’s not grand. It’s honest.