Someone directed my attention to a piece on blogging by Joan Westenberg. She/they (I'm not sure aout the preferred pronoun) consistently writes such excellent articles.
I agree with her about the annoying trend (I guess it began too long ago to be called a trend) to abandon blogs and limit oneself to social media. However, I would want to include some other considerations to that article.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-case-for-blogging-in-the-ruins/
First, for those who never had blogs, never written anything for online publication, maybe never thought they could write at all, social media opened the door a crack, and then opened it really wide. It got many people writing, participating in discussions, honing their skills in compostion and other creative fields too. It's just a pity that that's where many people got stuck, and where others who were already creating joined them. So a lot of creativity and serious thinking have been sucked into a black hole.
Second, a blog does not necessarily adopt the model of an essay. Some blogs are simply web logs - they may include careful thinking on various subjects, but they may also be simply a journal, or an attempt to process the traversal through life, sometimes including comments on stories in the news, on films or TV shows seen, or be a travelogue, etc. One of the longest-running blogs is that of Steve Winer at scripting.com. He writes about matters that interest him and about his life, all in an unstructured conversational tone that is quite different from an essay.
What I aspire to do with my blog is to include some of the short posts that would otherwise appear only on social media, alongside longer form writings. Sometimes ideas for posts begin in my paper notebook, and sometimes in short posts or discussions in which I have taken part in the fediverse.
Third, as many people have pointed out, a blog, arranged in reverse chronological order as is usually the case, is not necessarily the best vehicle for catalogueing serious thoughts or subjects. This can sometimes be alleviated by devices such as tags and categories. But there are wikis and other " digital garden" formats that are better adapted to this.
However it may be organized, a personal website might ideally include short, medium and long posts that span the interests of a writer, along with discussion.
Here, in this currently org-static-blog and cherry-tree notes generated site, I don't really have a means of including discussion. I allow that to happen in the Fediverse, but hope to include in the blog interesting comments when they are made.
I've written a wiki style piece on my experience with blogging:
https://vikshepa.com/wikis/blogging-systems/
Tech simplicity
I toyed again with the idea of installing Barry Kauler's EasyOs, yesterday. My adventures with technology are usually based on a desire for simplification, as a result of which I sometimes end up embroiled in endless complexity :-)
In our era of proprietary solutions, unfortunately the easiest thing is to allow ourselves to be spoon-fed (sometimes force-fed) by the big tech giants, who provide oodles of storage, promise instant visibility, easy connection with friends, and whatever else they think we need, all under an effortless, slick and fast interface. Every FOSS developer tries to mimic such useability, though without the hidden downsides of advertizing, analytics, algorithms and tracking - but regretably, they have fewer resources to work with.
I do seem gradually to be attaining some goals. For the past few years I have settled on MX Linux as my operating system, with a Windows laptop for backup for tasks I can do better than under Linux, like photo editing. For email I've been using Fastmail, and have also taken advantage of its file storage to host this site. However I still need other services to host the family photo archive, provide file sync and communicate on social media. I am always on the lookout for ways to simplify further.