Five habits for a blog that survives

Most personal blogs do not die from a lack of ideas. They die from friction. These are the habits that keep the friction low.

1. Publish small

A post of ten sentences is a real post. Waiting for a masterpiece is how a blog ends up with three entries and a draft folder.

2. Make publishing a single step

If publishing takes a checklist, you will skip it. Mine is: write, commit, push. Everything else is automated.

3. Keep a list of topics

Whenever something takes you more than an hour to figure out, write one line about it. That list is your next ten posts.

4. Do not chase the numbers

There is no analytics script on this site, and that is on purpose. A post is useful if it helps one person, or even only you in a year.

5. Own the boring parts

Keep your content as plain files in a repository you control. Themes, hosts and tools come and go, but Markdown files can move anywhere.