Hello, and welcome to Dailyish for August 28th, 2026.
I'm recording an episode every day for this, my 50th year on the planet
All right.
First of all, before I get into the topic of this episode, I just got some
good feedback on the previous episode on workflow and how I record daily-ish.
So again, feel free to send comments, questions, whatever in wherever you happen
to see me posting about this, or email me chris.enns@gmail.com with follow-up
questions or ideas for future episodes
Recently, we got together with my wife's family and a couple of her
sisters and their families were here or are still here as I record this.
But, we got talking one night about, you know, just social media and the
internet and how people use various apps and what they pay attention
to on social media, what they don't like on social media, et cetera.
And my wife's sister commented on how she had suddenly just rediscovered a blog.
While my father-in-law, her father, was alive, he had written a blog about his
travels and the various places they went.
Kind of a little travel blog that he didn't promote it a bunch and
tell a whole bunch of people about it, but kind of just for the family.
And she had noticed it, kind of was rereading it, and then while reading
a post on there, he had actually linked to my sister-in-- her sister,
my sister-in-law's blog, talking about her own adventures moving across
the country a number of years ago.
Well, it was interesting obviously just rediscovering those old stories
kind of in the context of talking about social media and timelines and
like how Instagram doesn't show you anything that you actually want to see
anymore, and how it used to be that you could just, you'd follow people
and it would just show you that.
Blogging and these blog posts were kind of like this refreshing reminder of how it
used to be that you would go to a website and you would just read the website.
There wasn't ads everywhere trying to convince you like every, you know, recipe
blog and advice blog, et cetera, website now has just ads everywhere trying to
get you to watch a video, trying to get you to sign up for their app, for their
newsletter, go to their YouTube channel.
All the promotion that happens on every single website these days,
and it was just barren, regular plain text on screen, readable, nice
And it's interesting for me as a, a tech person who's obviously been very
online over the course of my life, but also came from the world before that
where we didn't have online life, and blogs were kind of one of the original
ways for us to express ourselves online.
If you had a-- If you were new enough to have a website and buy a
domain, you could probably figure out how to set up a blog of some
sort and write things on a website.
So my website, chrisenns.com, where I've had a blog for 20-some years,
I think, has my, been my home on the web, and it's never gone away.
I've never-- There's been seasons where I've stopped writing, and there's seasons
where I'm writing more and posting more, but I've never really stopped.
And that's not to say I'm so great I have never stopped that, 'cause
I've still spent way too much time putting effort and energy into apps
and things of the day, like soc-social media, like Twitter and et cetera.
We've all done that
And even within the tech world, blogging kind of has this cyclical thing where
it goes away for a while because we're all like, we love micro-posting on
Twitter or whatever apps that come along, and then we rediscover blogs again.
And so, like within the tech world where I exist for my work and, and
part of my online existence, I guess, blogs kind of have this like every
four years, three to five years, they kind of come back and everybody gets
excited about writing their own blog.
And then they realize that it's harder, way harder to get likes and feedback on
your own site rather than existing on corporate site like Twitter or Facebook
or Instagram, where you get likes and you get comments and people share your
stuff much easier because it's just a matter of hitting a button rather than
like having to figure out how to share a link from a website, and then where do
you put that and how do you write your own blog and all that kind of stuff.
And so, it's just funny to hear and see quote unquote "normal people"
talking about blogging and being excited at the idea of doing it.
And it kind of like is a bit of a told- I told you so for those of us in
that blogging world and just web dev tech whatever, in that from the very
beginning, the sort of mantra was always own your own domain, own your own stuff.
You can share that out to Twitter or Facebook, et cetera, but
own your content on your site
Sometimes it's referred to as the indie web movement, indie
blogging, that kind of thing.
But at its core, it's basically like you write your own stuff, great, put
it on your website and then share a link to that outside to the rest of the
world via social media and et cetera.
But make sure that that site where they come and read it is yours, not Twitter,
not Facebook, not Zuckerberg's, et cetera
Which reminded me of a blog post on my blog that I'll link to in the show
notes back on December 2025 titled, "You Should Start a Blog Now or Later."
And basically, I just kind of highlight a few blogging CMS websites that
make it super easy to start a blog.
You don't even have to know how to register a domain name.
You can just start with it.
One is Bear, one is Pika, and basically kind of outlining how to start a blog
generally, like the tech has changed.
There's cool new stuff happening.
Um, if you're on Blue Sky, there's a whole thing called AT Proto for owning
your data, and then that allows you to set up a blog and other things
like that using services like Pocket Blog and Leaflet and things like that.
Doesn't really matter.
There's a- always new tech around this.
The core idea is like write your stuff on your domain, own that, and
then you have control over where it goes, how it's shown, whether
there's ads, whether there's, you know, sign up for my newsletter,
those kinds of things on your site.
You're not subject to the whims of the Zuckerbergs and
Musks, et cetera, of the world
I think if you're gonna ask me right now what to do, how to start a blog,
I'd recommend checking out Pika.
Pika.page is their website.
Sign up.
You can use it for free, or you can pay $6 a month or $60
a year to get started blogging.
Another service to check out actually is Buttondown, which is newsletter
sending, like email newsletters, but it's also kind of like a blog, You can
use that very easily as a way to have people be able to g- visit your website
or sign up and get it in email form, 'cause you can do both with Buttondown.
So buttondown.com or pika.page.
Links will be in the show notes, of course, at daily.chrisenns.com
If you've got a blog right now already or you sign up for one and set one up
as a result of this, please let me know.
Reply to this on social media or again, email me chris.enns@gmail.com.
I'd love to link to it in future episodes and subscribe to follow
along with your blogging adventure
All right, that's it for episode 271.
I think this is day 10 now in this little adventure.
355 more to go.
Thanks for listening.
Have a great day.
Bye.