Writing

I’ve been struggling with this ever since I started blogging 2 years ago (can’t believe it’s already been that long). But I’ve finally made the decision: I’m keeping this blog at mischavandenburg.com as a tech and career focused blog where I share technical knowledge and notes, and I’m starting a new personal blog at mischavandenburg.blog. I have fallen in love with blogging. Documenting my own life in writing has become a very therapeutic and valuable experience to me. Even if nobody reads what I put out into the world, it is incredibly satisfying to scroll through your own blog and go back in time to see what I was learning or doing or feeling at that time. ...

A great essay about small personal websites coded in HTML. Brings me back. https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-small-web/ Links: 202312150812

Nice article that explains why blogging is a satisfying activity. I’ve written the exact same reasons of why I blog on my about page where I wrote that it is very satisfying to scroll through your own feed and see what you have been up to. My blog is a time machine. https://brainbaking.com/post/2023/11/on-writing-for-yourself-in-public/ Links: 202311150711

I notice that I’m not writing in my journal every day like I used to. I always wrote down what I did, what I felt, what my plans and ambitions were, every single day. During my holiday I started writing by hand in a notebook again which was really nice. It felt good to feel the pencil scratching on the paper again and to practice my cursive writing. After I came back I first tried to keep journaling by hand again, but after a few days the journal remained untouched. I figured I would go back to my usual digital journaling again by writing daily notes. ...

Why bother with a personal website? Why not just write blog posts on LinkedIn? I want to own my data. I want to have complete freedom. I want to write whatever I want. This post captures it beautifully. Links: 202305171305 https://matthiasott.com/notes/simple-truths-about-personal-websites

With the spring finally being fully released on the Netherlands, my wanderlust has awakened again after lying dormant for two years. In my 9 years in Norway I became a seasoned outdoorsman spending much time roaming the mountains and forests and always spending days or weeks out in the wild with my tent. When I moved back to the Netherlands this has been put on hold for a couple of years while I focused on changing my career on IT. Now that the career is rolling along nicely by the looks of it, I’m super excited to start exploring the Netherlands and see what the outdoors life is like in an area where the nature is significantly less wild and abundant. ...

My recent post on E/N blogging led to a realization: posting on social media will be something I do for myself, instead of doing it for others. When Facebook came out when I was 16 I posted quite a lot on social media. 5 years later I found it very embarassing to read back through those posts and I deleted everything, and since then I have been been holding back on social media posting and deleting my accounts several times. ...

Read an interesting post this morning about E/N websites. Apparently a phenomenon from the early days of the web, E/N websites meant everything to the publisher, but maybe nothing to the rest of the world. The term may have been the predecessor of the term “weblog” which was shortened to blog. E/N description: The website’s author covers a myriad of topics. It’s not narrowly focused. The author writes about everything or at least everything that’s important to the author. The site might contain something useful for anyone who visits. The content means everything to the publisher, but it could mean nothing to the rest of the world. ...

I show my workflow to publish my Hugo blog from the command line using neovim and bash Links: 202305091705

Ah, writing. It’s one of the skills that I’ve consistently been praised for throughout my life. I’m pretty good at it, and I think that’s because I enjoy it. It led me to getting an academic degree in English Literature and Culture, simply because I was following the things I was naturally good at. However, just like any other skill, you can only become better at it through consistent practice. This morning I read a wonderful little blog post on writing regularly, and I was touched by his words: ...