2025-04-24
I think that blogs are very convenient for the author, but very inconvenient for the reader.
And I do admit that I had a blog before. But thinking on that matter convinced me that the better way is to maintain a static website like this one.
My main reason is that blog content is usually not well sorted - or not at all. The default order for the posts is to be published chronologically. That means, to find the posts that are interesting to you, you will need to go through all of them. If the view on the author changes on a subject, he will usually publish a new post on the topic - and maybe he updates the old post to include a link to the new one. The reasoning is that more people are likely to see the new post and click on it, but that means you are prioritizing numbers in your statistics over the quality of your content. A static page about the topic - call it an essay or an article - where the content is cultivated or cared for over its lifetime, is much more convenient to the reader. Your reader knows that this is the most up-to-date content on the topic.
When it comes to the sorting, I am aware that tags and categories exist. Nevertheless, in the usual blogging engines, when the user selects a tag or category the entries will still be sorted by their publishing date. I much prefer it to be sorted by what the author finds most important, or maybe a sub-hierarchy if applicable. Of course, that is more work, but doing it means to value the time of your readers.
One of the bad examples of these practices are so called “dumps”, e.g. “linkdumps”. I have seen this on numerous blogs, where the authors just “dump” interesting links they found since the last “linkdump”. If you, as a reader, want to look at all the links, you will need to find all their “dumps”, going through them sequentially, discovering that as the posts are older, more and more links don’t work anymore.
If you want to “curate” a link collection on your website, a dedicated static page is much better - put your links there. And then, use one of the many tools to check for dead links. If it is really dead, link to an archived page or remove it. The end result will be of a much higher quality.