you Hi, I'm Scott Hanselman. This is another episode of Hansel Minutes. Today, we've got Mark Downey. He was on the show back in 2018. We were talking about modernizing DOS Blog, the blogging engine that I worked on that was started by Clemens Vasters that is now... being shepherded by Mark. He's a principal product manager at Microsoft. But today we're going to be chatting about blogging. How are you, sir? Hi, Scott. You know, we met blogging.
Like that's the blogging is such a wonderful way to just meet cool people of like-minded. It is. Um, I started following your blog. Oh gosh. I want to say too. ages away here i think it was 2003 i want to say was it somewhere around there yeah yeah that sounds and There was a community of people. We would have blogs that were connected to each other. We would see blog rolls. I would get to figure out who else was blogging from
other people who were blogging because you'd be deliberate about connecting to those other people. Um, so for me it was. started off thinking about finding a community of people who were interested in the same things. At that point, it was just all about .NET and the kind of burgeoning new frameworks that were being shown by Microsoft.
Do you still blog only about .NET or are you like me? I know you have diverse background. You have music. Your username is Papa String. You do a lot of string instruments. Do you blog about music?
Yeah, I blog around, for me, it's about technology first. It's about how technology impacts culture. It's about how software impacts culture. It's about... um kind of the dangers we see ourselves in when technology kind of goes without any bounds or fences or kind of deliberation that precedes it so i kind of like to talk about the things around technology and i do
occasionally talk about my music and other things but i'm mostly around technology today do you think blogging is dying or dead i feel like google reader going away was ridiculous you know and i used like feed reader and different things like that but there was a there was a time there where Dario Basanjo had an app that was like the blogging app. There was no end of Windows apps that you would download that were like full fat client apps that would go and get RSS.
I don't have a blog reader anymore. I don't do that anymore. So do you think blogging is dead or is blogging more essential than ever before? I think blogging is more essential than ever before. I think what we have seen. is probably a need for blogging to be way easier than it was. But at the same time, I also think that I think if folks don't really realize how...
how to get started with blogging, they will just go to whatever's the easiest thing to do. And for that, obviously, with the rise of social networks everywhere during the period, you know, just after blogging was popular, that kind of sucked a lot of people's life out of their blogs, right? If they had... a little thing to say why why why kind of spin up all the ordeal of a blog to do that when i can go onto a social network um and what i've kind of found was
the inconvenience of potentially losing all my words was enough of a shot across the bow for me to always own the things I'm saying, to always have.
complete ownership of my words. So if I decide to edit them, change them, remove them, add more, modify, I don't have to ask anybody's permission. If those words are about to go away, no one can take away my words. So for me, Yes, I think there is an obvious decline in blogging, but I think it's because of the kind of ease through which you can do similar things, other places, anywhere else.
But I think there's also a downside to that ease of micro blogging, as it were, and these social networks. Yeah, there's a whole lot to unpack there. If you think about the success or... or failure of things based on friction. You know, Linux people are like, why isn't Linux happening on the desktop? Well, it's too hard, right? Like it's known to be hard.
And then they'll go, well, it's not that hard. Well, like saying it's not that hard is not enough to make Linux on the desktop a thing. And then if you say, well, you know, go ahead and set up a blog. Okay, what do you got to do? Register a domain, figure out your certificates, you know, like. Do you want to learn to drive? Well, here's a car you can build in your garage. It's not as easy as download the Uber app. So the effort it required to simply sign up to Mastodon was enough.
that blue sky is going to eclipse Mastodon and user base because people didn't like one additional step picking a server. So how, how do we make blogging easier? without it becoming a monoculture because WordPress is eating the world and also eating itself with its weird culture. But you should be able to go somewhere, sign up, get a domain. Why has no one done that?
Yeah. Like medium is the closest thing and everyone stays with the default domain. Yeah. It's, it's frustrating to see that. Um, gosh, it's, it's, it's just definitely a human problem. Like how do we get you. to not only sign up really quickly, but then have complete ownership. Like I can take this anywhere I want to go. Like my blogging engine is based on essentially under the hood, XML files. Like they're just text files. That's all.
they are i can take them and bring them anywhere and so in a way for me as a developer maybe part of this is me as a developer as well so i i as a developer i think of that as the most natural way to store information with absolutely zero barriers between me and it. But for others, maybe it's a little bit more difficult. As you say, I mean, I wouldn't know where to get anybody started on.
to to get a certificate like that like for a normal human being that is exactly it's just a way too higher to be managed area it needs to be reduced yeah Additionally, people, I don't think, realize how low the barrier to entry is to steal their stuff or to even back it up.
I backed up my TikTok this morning, but I had to download an app, pay $20. It calls their backend API, removes the watermark, like even the barrier to entry of that to make sure that when TikTok gets shut down, I have all my stuff. Like my son almost lost access to his Instagram. And it was a real wake up call of like all those pictures, years and years of pictures. They're not really yours.
Wow. You know, that's a walled garden. We hear that term walled gardens. Why is it so important for us to own our words? Man, I remember back in, was it 2005? Was it live? 2010 live spaces got shut down. That was for me when I realized, oh gosh, I didn't own this. I was literally planting food. on somebody else's land on somebody else's property like and i'm wondering why none of the food i've planted is in the place i put it well it wasn't your land to start with and
For any reason, this can go away at any moment. And that was when I was, you know, it was funny. That was when I was kind of at the moment of choosing, should I go with subtext or should I go with dustblog? And it just so happened to be dustblog at that moment. But that was the thing for me, is the inconvenience of having to set up my domain and my certificates and everything else.
was offset by the fact that I, that disruption was way more than I was assuming it would be. So the idea that you own Instagram in the way you think you do, you do, but you kinda don't. And, um, for me. That ownership part was just the most critical thing I could have. Yeah. This is an extended analogy, but I think you'll pick it up. So after the Civil War…
The Southern economy is in ruins and they needed farm people to farm the land. So they made a deal called sharecropping, right? Where you're a tenant. They give you seed. They give you tools. They give you living quarters. They give you food. look at all this great, look at all this stuff we're giving you. This is a great deal. And you don't own the land. And you sit there and then you pour your heart and soul into a space and then they go, you're fired.
You're gone and the land is gone. So digital sharecropping has been a conversation that's been happening for years. It was really, really big in the mid 2010s. It's this concept that they talked about in web 2.0, where you are building someone else's business with your words. And that's where you and I figured this out in 2003, 2005. Those are my words. And right now, here we are, we're building AI models without being paid. We're giving views to folks.
So there was this concept that Tantec Selleck, I need to have him on the show, talks about Posse, P-O-S-S-E. Right. Publish once, syndicate everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. He starts everything on his blog. If he says anything, any word, it starts on his website and then it proliferates from there. I don't even think, if you think about Twitter and Instagram and Blue Sky, even you and I haven't quite gotten that dedicated.
I think that is the ideal for me. I certainly don't do it yet. I've certainly tried a few of these syndications where they send out the one message everywhere. But my ideal thing, again, even for any of these kind of social networks, I own the words I say in the context I say them. and push it everywhere. I actually started an initiative where I was thinking about adding
Fediverse kind of mastered on support in the blogging engine. And part of me kind of rejected it after a while for that exact same reason. I think I want my blog to be the place where I store. and I exist, and then I push it wherever else I want. So that idea was, I think, a bit more stronger than the idea of complete integration. Yeah. There's a new thing that just launched that you probably, it's so new you probably haven't heard about it. It's called Micro.
And it follows the principles of the IndieWeb, the independent web. So the idea is data portability, open standards, and a domain name. So you basically go to micro blog, you sign up. It's pretty, pretty inexpensive, you know, like five, 10 bucks a month, depending on the level you want to do it. And everything starts there. Publish on your own site.
Syndicate elsewhere, syndicate everywhere, uses micro formats. So the idea would be you manually cross post to Twitter and then you automatically cross post to Mastodon to threads. Everything starts there. You and I had talked about doing this ourselves with Das Blog. And I've still, as a long form blogger, haven't quite got my head.
around what the IndieWeb folks and people like Tantec do, which is everything is on their first blog. Would I want just a random sentence, a random tweet to start on my blog? I would feel like it would be littering my... highly curated blog space but it works for them i wonder if we could get past that uh that would be really interesting but i do i do think it would need a redesign so i think we would have to have this notion of um
Because I was kind of thinking about this. We'd have to have the notion of the kind of short, this is just a couple of sentences. This isn't deep. This isn't... You don't need to necessarily consume this in your RSS feed, but it should still be owned by me. It still exists, but from my perspective. And then, as you say, push it to wherever I exist as a presence. would be a really compelling i think argument for for why people should start there yeah yeah um
This idea of federation, of federating things and attaching them to each other. I know that you were really interested in this before the holidays. We were talking about figuring out ways. We would own our words and move them over to things like Mastodon. Threads, of course.
is uh is has some fingers you know metas threads has some fingers into uh yeah but apparently today uh the hacky derm which is one of the most popular mastodon servers are defederated from threads so they're basically saying they will not look at threads, changing their moderation policies. Do you think that blogging in your own space is a way to get out of the content bubbles?
you know, where you're kind of just talking to yourself, the echo chambers? Yeah, yeah, I do. I think there's a tendency to repetition in social networks that is hard to avoid. And I really do kind of hunt for those blogs that kind of are going off in their own direction. I must admit, I did try to do a little, I think I may have mentioned this, I did try to kind of get integration with ActivityPub and the whole thing. That was inspired by actually a blogger, Mayho.
i hope i'm pronouncing his correct name correctly his website is meho.dev and he had done a whole integration with the activity pub so like like you could have a static site and still integrate with an activity pub in that regard and i was using that as inspiration for some of the work I was doing. But yeah, I think holding your kind of space, your garden and
and curating it the way you want so it doesn't just become part of the overall noise of a particular social network is really, really important. I think you get to kind of define. It's like when you're walking down a street. and you see somebody's garden and they've made a particular set of decisions for their space. I just love that kind of individuality that you have in blogging. And I think it's very, very, very much missing in today's kind of big social network spaces.
When you and I were doing DOS blog stuff back in the day, it felt like RSS was a simple enough, really simple syndication. You could hold it in your brain. Writing to those specs did not seem... difficult to me do you feel the same way about activity pub or is it getting to a level of complexity where you're noticing it no in fact honestly like in some way um i kind of gave up gave it up to be honest um
I just think the complexity level, even I've been doing this for 20 years and I thought, this is not worth it. And the idea that if there's going to be a change in some future iteration. And then I would have to do some more work to just, which is a game where I'd kind of go back to the kind of posse type. approach because I'd have to, I'd divorce myself of the kind of responsibility of having to keep up with what was really an incredibly verbose and very well.
thought out spec but it's still really really hard to kind of match um i i felt that that burden was just way too high uh a bar for me to kind of continue i wonder why it's so much more complex is it a matter of like this is just This is the, this is the world of identity that we have right now. Like it doesn't like back in the day we could just curl from the command line and now it feels like we're beyond that. Yeah.
I do feel like the flexibility of what they were trying to do and, you know, trying to account for the fact that you could do this in a variety of ways necessarily means that you've got to be almost ready for anything. I think it was, again, I don't mean to. to critique this because i you know i wouldn't know where to start if i was trying to do this myself but but it was it did kind of create some challenges for me shifting gears a little bit have you thought much about
making sure your blog gets read. You know, you and I are developers. We are writing for developers. I was talking with Cynthia Dunlop. She just came up with a book called Writing for Developers. And she had Brian Cantrell do the forward. I got to do the afterward. And she was basically saying, like, you can just slap the keyboard if you want. But if you want your blogs to get read, here's.
a way to think about technical writing and i'm curious how much you've curated your work to make sure that the blog posts are something that you'd be proud of yeah i i do think about that a lot i'm going to admit um my first principle is, is it something that I'd find helpful to me in some future date? Like that's my first kind of...
Is the principle of why I'm writing this going to be important to me some future point? And therefore, if I look through it through that lens, it's probably going to be important to somebody right now. Somebody's going to go through this. moment of this, ask themselves a similar set of questions. So for me, how I write is important because I have to assume that my goldfish-like brain will be completely forgotten.
everything i've talked about and thought about in the next month or so like it will just that's that bit will be overwritten let's just assume that and so i'm talking to myself again as if like i've never here right um And so in that regard, I'm always thinking about
Whoever comes to this may not know a thing about this and how do I approach them? How do I talk to them about this topic? Now, to be sure, I don't think I'm the best writer in the world, but I'm always trying to kind of remind myself of why I'm thinking this way. I'm trying to leave enough breadcrumbs.
where I know why I'm thinking this way and why I think this particular thing special or interesting or useful. So in that regard, I do think how you think about writing is tremendously important for you first. And then I think secondly, if you can serve your future self, you can serve others as well. Yeah, that goldfish brain, you know, like, what? Huh? What was I doing two seconds ago? I feel like that a lot.
I have had people say that my blogging is very empathetic because they feel like I'm kind of bringing them along for the ride and I'm being very gentle when they don't realize I'm doing it for me because I'm going to go and Google for that later. How many times have you Googled for something and found your own blog? It's happened multiple times. Yeah. And that's when you know you're truly alone on the internet.
You know what I mean? It's 2 a.m. It's a Tuesday night. You're deep into some HTTP header and then you Google it and you're like, oh, I had this problem in 2019 and I never figured it out. Now what do I do? But I always write to bring people up to speed. I always feel like, this is my criticism for folks that are listening, if you have a blog, more words. You're always missing a paragraph.
and you assume that I know way more than I do. Give me more context, please. Yeah, that's a really great point. I think the point of the blog is context. I think about the social networks that I'm a part of as these are my throwaway words. Like I am okay with these being thrown away. being attributed to anybody else. Like, I don't care how you treat these words, but the ones that are on my blog, I want to spend a bit more time thinking about the delivery.
thinking about what context I'm setting, I get to kind of set that up and no one gets to contradict me because it's my blog, you know? So, you know, I think that's much more important. So adding a few more paragraphs, sentences to kind of set context is critical. Yeah. In the book, that book that I think we have actually a coupon for that book I'll put in the show notes if folks want to get a copy of writing for developers.
And she, she, she agrees with me and the idea that it is the engine of community. I wrote a blog post a long time ago called your blog is the engine of community because you could go to Twitter and start a conversation or you could write a blog post. And it'll go on Hacker News, and it'll go on Reddit, and then it'll go on Twitter. And I say Twitter in quotes, generic microblogging. And it will be talked about. And I feel like it's...
The same thing applies at work. Like I don't like writing emails. I would rather write a document, put it somewhere with a URL and then give it to someone and then have them go and talk about it. Even if I could get away with writing it on my blog, like proposing a .NET. feature and then pointing the team at it means i can type less and i can get more done yes one of the reasons why i blog a lot actually it's because
I'm answering a question that I probably answered a few times already. Like you answered this question a few times. And if you've asked, if somebody is asking you the same question over and over again, you can save yourself a little bit of frustration. You can save yourself a little bit of time if you write that. And then that's a false multiplier right there. You have an order of magnitude, way more influence. More people get to share, read it.
I often think about the web as having a certain type of frequency, having a certain type of hum, as it were, and you get to add your kind of version of the web. you get to add it whatever that is for me i try to be um kind um uh thoughtful patient and the way i write contributes to that as well so so yeah taking the time to kind of create blog posts
that answer questions for people that they're constantly coming at you for. Like one of the things I've kind of taken a lot of mentors or mentees, excuse me. And I find I am repeating certain parts of my suggestions. over and over again and so you know i'm obviously happy to kind of share that in the moment but they need time to kind of sit on my words think about my words so i you know share the blog post this is what i'm thinking this is what i thought
feel free to kind of let me know what you think. It gives folks a time to rest on your words a little bit. Yeah, that is so true. People have heard me talk about conserving your keystrokes, and you only have so many. A lot of people, though, will say, oh, I shouldn't start blogging. No one will read it.
right now you said orders of magnitude i don't think people understand that word enough because if you write a blog post and 10 people read it and then maybe 100 people read it now we're starting to talk about orders of magnitude So 100 people read your blog. Oh, my blog didn't get a million views. It got 100. Got 100. Do you want to try to send 100 emails? Right? Like if three people read your blog.
That is a huge audience because it's not, it's you times two extra people. I feel like people should give themselves a little grace and you'd be shocked at how many times you probably had this experience. You write a blog post, you go to sleep and then you wake up.
the next day and that one throwaway blog post is blown up and everyone's reading it so like you just have to do the work yeah it's incredible i think writing for yourself should be your first kind of order it should be something that you find valuable for its value sake, I think that's always a really great place to start. But then, like you say, if folks are kind of connecting with your words and able to...
kind of learn more, remix and do something else. I think that's just, I think that is for me a great gift. And it's funny you mentioned about the throwaway blog. I think my most popular blog was one that was rooted in. I was trying to figure out how to do my yearly reviews. And I was constantly frustrated by deciding which words to use. And I said, well, I'm just going to write this because I do this every year anyway.
Um, so I wrote this blog post about how I approach that. And that has ended up being like, I get tens of thousands of views on this page alone. I threw this away. It was like. Only I'll come back to this this time next year when I'm doing reviews again. But apparently not. Everybody does reviews. That's the thing. And you assume it's just of no value, but then folks just keep coming back.
It's so funny how I talk to people who get all in their heads about their blogs and they say, oh, I've got five or six blog posts and drafts. I'm like, drafts? No, just publish the draft. If you're listening right now. Mark and I are experienced decade, multiple decade long bloggers just publish the draft because you're, you're, you're just every day that you don't publish that draft is a day where no one's reading it.
It's not doing any good in your drafts. It is a little disheartening, though, I will say. I will work for a week on a perfect technical blog post, and 100 people will read it. Or like my viral TikTok last week. You know what I mean? I worked so hard to make all these informative TikToks and I get a thousand views. You know, my wife says, I'm going to run to the bathroom real quick and then we're going to go to the movies. And in that...
Three-minute period, a throwaway TikTok gets a million views. Yeah. Like, what are we even doing here? Yeah. It's why I think you just curate the garden you want for you. Yeah. People will enjoy it as they see fit as they're passing by. Exactly. Worrying about the passers-by too much, I think, is... Like, no one's going to... Don't chase the audience.
Yeah. Yeah. I would just kind of let you yourself with the audience. And if you're finding value, I assure you of the 7 billion people on this planet, there's going to be a few of them who match your kind of view of this. I love that perspective. You're right. You need to remind yourself seven, eight billion people. That's 8,000 million. Yeah. Someone's into your thing, whatever you're into.
Underwater basket weaving. There's a blog. You should blog about it. And again, if 10 people read it, then you found your 10 people. It's not about the audience. Don't chase the audience. On that kind of exact note, I think as well, worrying about your cadence, worrying about when the right time, I kind of like to get things done.
in the time it takes like or blog when the feeling hits me like right now it's kind of a monthly thing for me um it is right now i've taken time off i have come back um i have uh you know gone on binges where I'll blog daily or weekly. And I think that all of those are okay. You know, COVID slowed me down and I haven't blogged in like a year. And then out of nowhere, I just...
a thing happened and I was like, I'm a blog. And I blogged about the thing. It was like a technical fix or something. And I thought it was so funny. I, someone in the comments said something along the lines of, it was a young person. I could tell by the way they wrote, they said,
What a king. Not a word for a year. And he just shows up with a technical post. No apology. Nowhere have you been. Just here's a new post. And I was like, you know, that's probably the way I should have done it. Like, I'm not going to be like. Oh, sorry. It's been a busy time. You know, I'm rededicating myself to blogging. I blogged every Tuesday and Thursday for 20 years. I took a break. I'm allowed to have a break. I think that is perfectly okay. I can.
I think we have to think about our blogs less about what the latest thing we did and more about what it is we've done. I don't look at somebody's garden and say, you haven't planted anything new this year. I just look at the garden for what it is. And like you say, I Google Bing myself all the time, accidentally, sometimes. Yeah, not ego binging or ego Googling, yeah.
answered this question already i've asked in fact i've written blog posts twice assuming that i didn't write it the first time right oh wow so this idea of having a body of work is by itself valuable whether you're going to keep doing it forever or doing it for a year or doing it for, you know, while you're on this new course that you think you need to get feedback on. You know, so this might be controversial, but I would rather someone have a blog than a social media presence.
And I feel like young people are out there trying to, I have got 20,000 followers on Twitter. I ask open-ended questions about JavaScript and everyone follows me for my wisdom. I don't care. Show me that you're a technical writer. Yes, it should be easier to get a domain. But if you could write a blog engine or even deploy one like yours, like DOS blog. That's going to show me that you're keeping the site up, you're updating the certs, you're blogging long form. It's a living resume.
You have a decades-long resume of content that shows that you are a competent technologist. That's much more interesting to me than a lot of followers on LinkedIn. I'll tell you, the thing I value when I see bloggers is that they take time to learn how to communicate. That is a really, really, I don't care how well you program at some point.
you're going to have to convince somebody of the value of the thing that you are suggesting or doing. And having a really strong way to communicate through writing, there's no substitute for that kind of skill.
Yeah, 100%. So in a world now where you could do it the hard way and register the domain yourself, or you could go to somewhere like micro.blog and have them do it for a buck or two, do you think people should... who's getting started with blogging do that easier way or should they drive stick shift like so i'm obviously hugely biased so i'm gonna always opt for the stick shift i think knowing it even if you're not going to use it
consistently is the way to do it. I think you should own your words. If you're going to go with anything else, I would just make sure you have a strong exit strategy, that exit strategy that you can take your words with you as soon as you decide it's no longer valuable, it's not for you.
Um, certainly I would, I would not go with a solution that wouldn't allow me to take my words with me and take my images with me and take my time with me. Um, so for, but for me, I would obviously encourage people to to have a presence, have an identity that you own and that you contribute to on your terms. Very cool. Well, folks can check out DOS blog core. at your GitHub. Your GitHub is papa string, P-O-P-P.
a string and your blog is also called pop a string as well you can see pop a string.com and then if you're interested in checking out that writing for developers book that's by cynthia dunlop i'm going to put a link to that in the show notes and we've got a 50 off coupon until march 10th uh the coupon is hm dunlop and i'll put that in the show notes as well so if you're interested in blogging we're here like like join the community right love to have them
Fantastic. Thanks for hanging out with me, Mark Downey. Thank you for the time. This has been another episode of Hansel Minutes, and we'll see you again next week.