Pingbacks and Personal Connections

Matt Mullenweg’s birthday wish is for people to blog. I thought I’d blog about how blogging has connected me with all different kinds of people, most of whom I’ve never met in person, just through the simple act of writing something on my own domain and hitting “Publish.”

Here is a non-complete list of blog posts I’ve written over the years that complete strangers have emailed or messaged me about.

I didn’t write these with SEO in mind. There has never been ads on this blog. I wasn’t paid to write any of these posts. I just wanted to share what I’m doing/thinking/working on in hopes that it might help someone later. They mostly help me later, but I’m delighted they’ve helped other people, too.

Shopsmith repair

Weather stations

Digital gardens

Publishing photos I’ve taken in a Japanese science magazine

A possible relative from Hungary after seeing a post mentioning my grandmother’s name

Miele coffee maker repair

Jekyll RSS feeds and Jekyll tools in general

Uploading images to WordPress via Apple Shortcuts

Micropub implementations with Apple shortcuts

WordPress REST API & XML-RPC API with Apple Shortcuts

Domain name longevity

WordPress Block art

Arc browser

How to design projects for learning things

Paleo/primal lifestyle

Compiling WordPress Contributor stats

Why to blog

Moving files to a Mac from Microsoft Remote Desktop

CSS Confetti

Responsive D3.js bar chart with labels

How to pre-fill Google forms

Let’s make a pie chart with D3.js

Get the most out of your Kindle with these 4 tools

Adding Homebrew MySQL service to your PATH

Facts about the Hudson River

Adding months to a calculated date in Salesforce

Making hotdogs without a grill

Infusing gin with rose

Mocktails that don’t suck

A year of kombucha experiments

Starting a home bar

Lentil soup

The long exposure guide Sean and I wrote

Thanksgiving meal price inflation

Running Zapier actions only during business hours

Books I’m reading

My F1 kayak builds

Spoon carving

Five Minute Journal TextExpander Snippets

Scraping Reddit

AppleScript

I’m sure there are more I haven’t remembered.

The emails and messages from some of these posts have turned into IRL friendships, freelance work, speaking gigs at conferences, real job offers (including two I took!), news quotes, and having my art included in shows.

This still surprises and amazes me whenever I stop to think about it. I’ve only been blogging for ~15 years, most of that using WordPress. Starting blogging in 2008 felt like I was late to the game. Compared to Matt, I was, but doing things consistently for years adds up.

Now, 15 years after deciding to blog, I’m proud to have a job working for Matt at Automattic where I can help other people create their place on the web.

The internet is what you make of it. Blogging is what you make of it.

Happy Birthday, Matt, and thanks for doing what you do.