Sometimes I have a love-hate relationship with my personal blog. I love writing, and I have so many ideas, bits, and pieces in my writing dashboard. However, once I thought I finished my post, I did not have the confidence to hit publish. And the reason for that was that I somehow had the feeling that my post was way too short to be considered a blog post. I kept holding back onto a lot of my blog posts just because I thought they were too short. So, I did not publish them. I can only assume what lead to this assumption, and it is tightly woven into the fact, that you consume what you want to create. My RSS reader is full of feeds publishing long-form posts, opinionated essays, researches, learnings, and more. The only short-form content I was consuming got posted on Mastodon and Bluesky.

Therefore, my assumption is that I pressured myself into only writing long-form posts because that was the main form of content I consumed when it comes to reading online. And it not only applied to my blog post but also to my personal newsletter Datest for which I still have not wrote a single post, because I always thought the short bits and pieces I had prepared are not worth posting.

Something changed though and I can not really pinpoint what it was. But I suddenly started asking questions: Why should I not publish that I added a new route to Kurvio, the website I created to discover road cycling routes across Austria? Why should I not let you know that you can now suggest POIs in Velorino, the iOS app I built to find public water dispensers, snack stations, and self-service cycle stations when being out on a ride? Or why should I not write about Futter, a new iOS app I started working on to create structured plan for the right amount of carbohydrate intake while running or cycling? Just because those posts would probably be super short and not long form?

Sure, I could post these updates on Mastodon or Bluesky, however, for me, my blog is the home of my projects. A post on social media scrolls away within hours, and while this has its beauty too, it is not the right fit for my posts (I know I could achieve the best of both worlds with POSSE, but I do not have it in me right now to figure out how that would work with my current setup). A blog post stays, and it belongs to me.

I would also like to point out that blogs did not start out as a place for essays. Many early weblogs were mostly short notes and links to interesting things around the web. And it is lovely to see that people are still doing that as well as others getting back into it. Short posts are not a lesser from of blogging.

It took me some time to realize that writing is not about getting letters on a page. It is not about getting done with text. Writing is about finding a clear and simple expression for what we feel, mean, think, and want to express. And your personal blog is the ultimate playground for that. No constraints, no boundaries. You are free to decide what to post, how it looks, how it reads, no matter if it is as short as one sentence, or as long as thousands of words. The idea should decide the length, not a vague feeling about what a "real" blog post is supposed to look like.

So expect more short posts here: project updates, small thoughts, things I found interesting. And if you are sitting on a draft yourself because it felt too short, consider this your sign to hit publish. Maybe that is how a love-hate relationship with your blog turns into just love.