I’ve always struggled with Social Media. I use it quite often – perhaps excessively, but everything feels so temporary. Tiny status updates are meant to live for a moment and then disappear into the void. Yes, you can scroll back and find old posts, but it never really feels like an archive. You can’t truly organize your history, format it, or present it thoughtfully.
What pieces of your past deserve more than a social media post? What stories do you wish you had documented better? A camera can only see what’s happening in front of it. It can’t express your thoughts at the time and surrounding events. It can’t convey why the event mattered or what struggles you faced.
Enter websites – or at least, return to them. I’ve always had blogs since the beginning of time. Before blogs, I was creating a “news” section on my websites. There was a LiveJournal and Blogspot (now Google Blogger), but WordPress is my go-to platform. It has limitations for programmers deep in the code, but I work around them.
Posts
The blog feed is where all the magic happens. This is similar to viewing someone’s Facebook feed, except there is always a title. However, clicking the title will take you to the content, and you can add details. Blog posts can be categorized and tagged to make them easier to organize and locate related posts.
I can add as little or as much content as I like. Content can be formatted. I can make things bold. I can add inline images and videos. I can link to other pages, posts, pictures, or external sites. I can even post audio files and PDF documents.
There is also the ability to make a post “sticky” so that if you write posts later, the sticky post still appears first in the list.
Pingback
If you link to one post from another on your blog, you’ll receive a pingback, and the other post will show in its comments that your page is related to it. This isn’t limited to your blog alone. Other blogs that support this feature will show that your blog mentioned them.
Documenting the Past
Now, that’s all fun and games, but I also like to go a step further in documenting significant events in my past, long before the internet existed. You can create blog posts with a past date. Not only will I make a small summary about what happened that day, but I’ll also add a section titled “Reflection” along with the current date, and write out my memories. For example, I might write a blog post about the job I started that day, followed by a reflection on the experiences I recall from working there. Usually, on social media, you write in the moment.
Drafts
Do you have a lot of research to put together, or do you need to confirm something? You can start working on a post and save it without publishing it on the blog.
Scheduling Posts
Are you going out of town for a week, but still want to keep your blog active? You can schedule a few posts to be released each day of the week at any time you like. For example, I have a list of topics for the 100-word stories weekly challenge for the following year. I’ve created eight weeks’ worth of challenges and submitted them to the podcast host, and I’ve also scheduled my own blog entries to publish each week. Would you happen to have a monthly meeting? Why not post the announcement a week in advance for your organization, reminding people of the day and time?
Pages
Pages are static information you want people to view, in addition to your blog posts. It’s stuff that doesn’t change often. The blog posts are newsworthy items, where pages may be a portfolio of products, artwork, services, contact information, etc. You can even add a hierarchy of pages so that you can categorize products or life events any way you like.
Query Loops
With the ability to backdate, categorize, and query posts on a page, I can create a historical account. For example, I made a page featuring a long-form resume of my career history, which includes three separate query loops: jobs I held in public education (grades K-12), jobs I held before my IT career and during college, and jobs I had in the IT industry. Each entry includes the company logo, name, position, date, a 40-word dry resume description, and a link to read more. You click the link and will see the blog post dated to the date I started, along with a few additional details. Following that, I have my reflection on all the events I recall. Many of these are valuable details about the tech industry in its infancy, how Gen X kids got summer jobs, and what the world was like at the time. It’s a journal, a memoir, and a historical account.
Theming
Social media sites lack any sense of theming beyond a profile picture or banner image. You can’t even control the color. These networks are more focused on their own branding. With a blog, you can control the appearance. Many themes are available out of the box, allowing you to change a few colors and images. If you get comfortable with the themes and block editor, you could modify them heavily to make the site your own. Once you upgrade or install the open-source software on your own host, you’ll get control over the theme’s PHP files and can really customize the appearance.
Export
Blogs have an easy way to export and import data built right into the admin panel.
Podcasting
Podcasts are easy to set up by including an audio file. You can specify that posts in a specific category are the only ones that appear in the podcast.
Google It!
You can use Google to search your entire website. First, it needs to discover and crawl everything. Once that’s done, you can then use powerful search terms to do more than a simple search against your website.
Internet Archive
Everything lasts forever… almost. With the Internet Archive’s power, once it indexes your site, you may be able to recover lost content. You can also view snapshots of your website as it looked in the past versus today.
Wrap Up
Blogging gives us space to build something lasting, thoughtful, and truly ours. It isn’t just about posting updates; it’s about preserving experiences, telling stories, and creating a digital home we control.
