What Am I Even Blogging About?

When you sit down to blog… and suddenly forget what you were going to say.

I’ve been thinking lately about what to blog about. I’ve had several ideas. The reason I’m blogging about this is because I’ve been trying to figure out what should be a blog post. I tend to think posts should be medium to long in nature. But people aren’t reading my stuff anyway, and honestly, do I really care?

I’m blogging for myself, just to get my thoughts down and out of my head.

I use Sharkey and Micro.blog for what I call short-burst posts and reactions to things happening in the moment. Kind of like I did back in the pre-Musk Twitter days.

Back in February, I blogged about whether anybody even reads my posts. In the weeks and months that followed, I saw other people wondering the same thing. I found that kind of amusing, since I had just written about it and was thinking the exact same thing.

I have four blogs, all focused on personal ideas, thoughts, life happenings, and really just about anything. You might ask, “Why so many?” Well, when I started thinking about moving away from WordPress, I went back to my old Google Blogspot/Blogger blog. Then I started doing some serious searching and research.

I first settled on Write.as and even bought a separate domain for it. But it felt a bit dated and disjointed.

Then I found Micro.blog through several sources, and I liked it a lot. After joining, I appreciated the community, the technologist who runs it, and the overall concept and service. However, I had already paid for five years of Write.as service, plus the original year, because they had a sale that was too good to pass up. At the time, I hadn’t fully decided if Micro.blog was the right one for me.

Later, Micro.blog introduced me to Scribbles, and I really fell in love with its WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web editor. I think it's best in class. It was missing some things that Micro.blog offers, but Scribbles was a one-time purchase, so I bought it.

Like Write.as and Micro.blog, Scribbles is run by real people, not a big corporation. Vincent Ritter, the creator and owner of Scribbles.page, is doing great work on the platform, and it looks sharp. He also works with Manton Reece on Micro.blog, which makes the connection even more interesting. I much prefer one-time purchases over subscriptions, and Scribbles offered that.

Then AI entered the picture, and I ended up really liking ChatGPT, even though I had some hesitation. I’m still not sure Sam Altman is someone I trust, but the product itself is excellent and works well.

I tried other tools too. The only one I liked besides ChatGPT was Claude AI, which uses a yearly subscription. If I have to subscribe to something, I prefer a yearly plan. Claude isn’t as full-featured as ChatGPT, but it seems to help more with troubleshooting code. I’m not a software developer, but for a beginner like me working with Python, Claude makes things just a bit clearer.

I also tried Google Gemini, and at least on the free plan, it’s frustrating. It often refuses to answer even mildly controversial or nuanced questions with that robotic “I’m still learning about this” message. It doesn’t feel useful or confident. I haven’t tried the paid plan, and honestly, the free version didn’t convince me that the paid one would be any better.

Claude’s paid plan is helpful, but even that runs into usage caps more often than I’d like. ChatGPT, on the other hand, gives me consistent results and generous access for getting real work done.

At some point, I stepped back and realized just how many services I’ve paid for. Between the blogging platforms like Micro.blog, Write.as, Scribbles.page, and Blogger, and the AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude, I’ve invested in quite a few things to support my writing and publishing.

So I told myself: I’m going to actually use all of them. I paid for them, I like them, and I want to get my money’s worth out of each one.

With help from ChatGPT, and sometimes Claude, I started mapping out how to connect it all. What I’m still missing is a central place to write and publish directly from my Windows desktop. Each blogging platform has its own quirks, so I’ve been working toward something that brings them into a more unified process.

I bought Typora, and I really like it, but it only works smoothly with Write.as. I’m testing other word processors that support RTF for Scribbles. For Blogger and Micro.blog, I’m still exploring options. I don’t usually post directly on Blogger; I use it more as a backup archive for Micro.blog.

Right now, Micro.blog is my main blog. I’ve probably said that many times before. I either use the web editor or Lillihub, which is a Micropub poster created by Loura at heyloura.com. She did a great job with it.  I’ve really come to enjoy using it, and if there ever were a Windows desktop version, I’d be first in line. That’s how impressed I am with the tool. 

So, I started by asking what to blog about and ended up answering it by writing this. I guess that’s how blogging works sometimes.

Whether you’re figuring out your own setup or just curious about mine, thanks for tagging along.

#blogging #digitalgarden #microblogging