My Website is My Kingdom

I've been hand-writing HTML webpages since 1994, so when I inhaled Chris Zukowski's wildly great advice to not build(ing) your castle in other people’s kingdoms, it gave me hope (and a smack of confirmation bias) about this very kingdom you've stepped into. As the year 2024 comes to a close today, and the future isn't looking so bright, I'd like to celebrate my internet dominion - this website and blog.

I am both Editor-in-Chief, publisher, sole investor, and lowly grunt writer for this. I get to change topics, themes and design with every post. I don't give a shit about trending topics, calculating clickthroughs or surging story traffic - I care about age and authority. Did I have an opinion on it, how many years ago did I post it, and how have I changed since then? This Kingdom isn't designed for you, it's designed for me - I write because I forget, and this searchable archive holds a lot of my opinions - turning my internal monologue into literary prose. The nice thing about all of this is it'll be maintained forever, as long as my domain registration and spare change Amazon S3 bills are paid (and even beyond thanks to the Internet Archive!)

4 out of 5 Dentists Agree!

Blogger Chris Holdgraf responded to Zukowski's post on Nov. 22, and pointed out the surging traffic that BlueSky is getting: Another Kingdom, So Many New Castles... He did sum up Zukowski's advice nicely into a succinct list:

• Build your castle on land you own
• Shamelessly use other kingdoms just like they’re using you
• Always move people back to your kingdom, never to another kingdom
• Operate like your castle can get shutdown tomorrow
• Be suspicious of new kingdoms that give away easy visibility
• Give good reasons to go back to the Castle in your Kingdom. And be persistent!

On the same day, Nate Silver championed the success of private Kingdom's with the sage advice: Always. Be. Blogging. which, besides being a delightful mantra, details the other supporting roles in a writers career - especially since Nate is slinging his Substack subscription, where he's literally putting his money where his mouth is! Lots of good advice here!

Kingdom of Overgrowth More Like It

The surge of new posts on this very blog (I do apologize for 2021's pithy amount) is the direct reflection of taking these other blogger's lessons to heart. Some of the lessons are easily put into practice, others need serious help.

I write and post easily(-ish) enough that it's not the bottleneck. Sometimes crafting longer story beats is ignored, There's no rhyme or reason to the publishing schedule, I rarely stick to a few themes, and my page titles are purposefully obfuscated to even me after a year or so. I blame my ADHD, as I know SEO better than I demonstrate in my own Kingdom. Maybe part of my Start Often Finish Rarely hacker ethic?

In 2025, I'm going to make a better effort to add breadcrumbs in the URL by including the publishing date, and possibly add hashtags to future stories to allow quick and painless sorting. Now if I could only train my A.I. to compose perfect blog titles that attract my ideal audience! I should do a lot of cleanup and relinking on decades old posts, as I'm switching to a new templated User Interface, and this might be the time to strike while the Iron's hot.

On the other hand, self promoting new blog entries and adding timeliness and inviting outside traffic in is another story. I need to start building new castles, with a thin link bridge back to this kingdom... No one will find my tiny Blog thanks to a search engine!

(Bad) Prospects of Habitable Land in other Kingdoms

I gave up on Twitter X (...stupid domain name!), as all my followers were obviously Bots or Sex Workers. No 'verified' users, so all followers and traffic was lies, and external links to other people's kingdoms now untrustworthy. Any service that can be bought is not worth the money you paid for it, Dumbass. Strike Three, You're Out!

I dipped my toe into Mastodon, and paid for a year at a local instance, but have been operating outside of some of the main Kingdoms for far too long to try and build an 'online' community. I'd dumped Facebook, Instagram, and WordPress decades ago and didn't care or know anyone operating online. Outside of following the moderators, I grew quickly bored and didn't want to piss anyone off by ...shudder... self-promoting on Mastodon (it's highly discouraged!), especially to an audience looking for community, not the sludge of Facebook and Instagram.

Now I'm on BlueSky, and it's Mastodon all over again. Chris Holdgraf was right to give it a scorned review. My own gripe about stopping my "News" habit has the side effect of me avoiding BlueSky for the very reason - it's a delightful liberal bubble to visit, but full of News Propaganda and other's righteous indignation. The lack of it's ability to schedule posts really limits it's usefulness, and will require regular effort to maintain a strict marketing schedule - putting me in a precarious dilemma of requiring me to visit a site I know will have News on it. While my current followers seem to be real people, I wonder if they can be convinced to leave the Blue Skies for possibly Grey Clouds on my Blog...

Stay tuned by subscribing to my RSS feed or following me on BlueSky to see if I follow through and cross-link new Blog Posts there...

Blogger Den Delimarsky chimes in with a longer form (and more well-thought out) 'Be A Property Owner And Not A Renter On The Internet', although he doesn't believe in income link traffic from 'other people's kingdoms' as much as Chris Zukowski suggests. Found in the comments, POSSE (an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) has reports of others using this method from as early as 2010.