So I’ve Been Blogging Again
If you follow me here, on Medium — which quite a few of you do, thank you! — you may have noticed an uptick in activity in the past few months. In fact, since early October, I’ve been doing one or more posts almost every day. But I haven’t been publishing most of them here, on 500ish, but rather to my Medium profile page. With the recent revamp to those pages, I wanted to try to blog in a more OG-style. Less polish, fewer words, more links, some images, embeds, etc. Kind of like a cross of what made old school Blogger fun mixed with what made old school Tumblr fun.
Anyway, I’m writing this now because remarkably, I have stuck with it. Here I am, three months later, at the start of a new year once again writing about my intention to write more. But this time with some progress to show for it.
But wait, another place to write/publish? Well, sort of. The nice thing about doing this all on Medium (which powers 500ish as well, of course) is that all I have to do is open the editor and start writing.¹ I can then decide where to publish — if it’s going to be a longer-ish more fully formed essay, I’ll publish there. If it’s just some quick blurb-y thing, I’ll just post it right to my profile stream.² The good news as an end-user/reader is that the 500ish posts automatically go into that stream as well. So if you, say, wanted to see everything, you could just visit that page (or subscribe to its RSS feed).³ But if you just wanted to more substantial posts, you could just go there (or subscribe to that RSS feed).⁴
I’m making this sound more complicated than it is, honestly.⁵ The reality is that this has been my latest “hack” to try to write more. And again, it’s working. And it’s working for a very obvious reason: when you remove the baggage of thinking you need to write something fully formed, you just start to write and sometimes a fully formed thing forms! And sometimes it doesn’t, and that’s okay too!
The key is just to write, to write, to write. To start.
I will add that Medium’s mobile app also makes it pretty easy to do these short posts on-the-go. I’ve long struggled with trying to “write” on a phone, but again, when the baggage is removed…
If I’m being honest, I’ve also liked writing these quick posts/thoughts/blurbs without worrying about sharing them or knowing that people who follow 500ish will see them. At the same time, analytics indicate that quite a few people are actually seeing them (again, thanks to the Medium follow functionality and the revamped homepage which highlights those follows, I assume). So there’s no use being coy about it.
It’s a blog.⁶ It’s fun. It’s not too serious. But sometimes it’s more serious than I let on. At the same time, it gives me an outlet to do what I want to do, which is write more. And I want to do this because to me, writing is thinking. If I see something interesting, I jot down notes about it and then write those notes back in the form of sentences (or half sentences) to organize thoughts. Some people seem to like following those thoughts, others prefer things which are more fully baked. No worries, either way, I’m doing it regardless.
And see: here I was thinking this would be a quick blurby thing, but I’m already past 500 words, so… to 500ish it goes. And so it goes.
¹ Still by far the best editor/CMS, in my opinion. Which is a biased one. But still, I’m not wrong. It’s just such a fantastic, simple space in which to write.
² Don’t I want to own my own domain for this, rather than mgs.medium.com? Honestly, sort of, but again, I’m not taking this too seriously at the moment. I obviously have and use 500ish.com for this reason. But I’m not too worried about it, right now. I own all those posts and could re-publish them elsewhere if I ever needed and/or wanted to. That’s more than I can say for Twitter, where I now have over 14 years (!) of glorious content.
³ I have a simple Twitter account for links as well, if that’s more your style.
⁴ And yes, a Twitter account for that as well.
⁵ And none of this event mentions how I’ll use Twitter and/or my newsletter going forward. I have thoughts, but let’s not get to those just yet…
⁶ And as you’ll see if you go back through the past three months, I’ve been experimenting with various formats too — link posts using Medium’s automatic link expander, some without it, some with titles, some without, etc. I would expect that to continue. Tone too. I’ve always found that writing more unlocks new writing styles, as I get bored with the same old “voice”.
