In the beginning of March, I blurted this out in pure frustration on Twitter:
People posting mile long threads on Twitter; get a damn blog or something.
— Fredrik Frodlund (@frippz) March 5, 2017
Then, a few weeks later, a gentleman named Paul Lloyd tweeted:
Here’s a crazy idea: threaded tweets, but logged together, on a single webpage. A ‘weblog’, if you will.
— Paul Lloyd (@paulrobertlloyd) March 21, 2017
Great minds think alike, yes? 😉 Jeremy Keith shared our view as well. I think this is great for many reasons. For my own part, I created this blog (or journal as I so “hipstery” chose to call it) just to have something fun to tinker with all the time. Plus, I really wanted to get in on this whole static site generator craze everyone was talking about. As a side bonus I got to learn and refresh a whole slew of skills, like setting up and securing a server on Digital Ocean, making build scripts that trigger when I push to Git and more. It’s plenty of fun and it allows me to play with things that I don’t always necessarily get to do at work.
There’s more to it, though. Someone once said that owning your content is a pretty good thing. I’m sad to say that I can’t remember who said it, but it’s a good thing nevertheless. I honestly can’t understand why some great authors chose to publish on Medium, but to each his own, I guess. Reading stuff on Medium is fine, I suppose. Still, their highlighting feature is really weird and distracting.
In any case, my initial tweet on the matter was borne out of frustration. I was frustrated that people that had great and interesting things to say chose to chop it up in 140 character bits and streamed it intermixed with other people more or less useful thoughts. Threading on Twitter is horribly broken at times and if you instead chose to publish your thoughts on something more user friendly than a Twitter thread (and hey, you can always tweet about that post afterwards), then I salute and thank you!
Keep posting great stuff, I will keep reading it and share it with others.