Owning My Own Content

I produced a decent amount of content in 2017. In fact, I wrote more blog posts than I have since 2013. Just not here.

I wrote 17 posts for the Snyk blog and a handful of posts for other sites as well. I posted 889 tweets to Twitter. I reviewed 47 books on Goodreads. I’m probably forgetting some other things.

But here, on my own site? Four. I wrote four posts. For someone who loves to talk about how important it is to own your own content and to write for yourself, I’ve done precious little of that as of late.

Goals can be fickle things, but I’m going to set myself a goal for 2018: I want to walk the game I talk. I want to get back to owning my own content. That doesn’t mean cutting back on posts for Snyk—that’s part of my job and I’m happy to do it. But it does mean writing more frequently here as well. It means treating my own site as the hub for the content I post elsewhere instead of letting it accumulate cobwebs.

There are a few obvious steps. I want to replace Disqus with web mentions. I want to be more disciplined about using my site for bookmarking links I find interesting. Instead of posting to Twitter directly, I want to use my site as the hub for that content and let Twitter feed off of that (similar to what Jeremy has been doing). The same goes for book reviews.

Another obvious step is to remember that my site is my own, something I tell many others but apparently don’t apply to myself. While I love the web, that’s not the only thing I care about—it represents a small sliver of who I am. I write to understand and remember. Sometimes that will be interesting to others, often it won’t be.

But it’s going to happen. Here, on my own site.