I had been suffering from phantom pains over my shut-down blog for a long time. A thought buried deep in my mind that would not leave me alone, though something kept getting in the way. One of the things that stopped me—and lately the only thing—was that I had lost the backups. Buried them somewhere and forgot where: at midnight under retrograde Mercury, walk a hundred steps north-northwest from that red ivy, find a squirrel skull, dig underneath. There were other blockers too, or so I thought, but they turned out to be excuses.
Recently I read Zhelty’s post about Dovolny’s post, then Dovolny’s own post about the evolution of content. An interesting classification of the kinds of content out there. First, what caught me was that my favorite category was missing: fundamental knowledge that is specific to traffic arbitrage on one side and makes you think and experiment on the other. Knowledge that stays relevant for a long time, then even longer. Second, I immediately tried it on for size: what kind of content would I write, and where would it fit? That thinking produced a few drafts. That was when I decided enough stalling, pulled the little blog out of Wayback, and got to work. I cannot say it was easy or pleasant. I still have to rebuild normal navigation, sort out the categories, and update some posts, but the first step is done. Now there is a blog and there is a channel.
Why I restarted
I went through another transition from quantity to quality (I hope). There are many topics I want to structure, first of all for myself. It turns out that structuring things for myself is faster, clearer, and more pleasant when I do it in a format for an outside reader. There is a clear portrait with a set of knowledge, skills, experience, and history. It immediately becomes clear what the goal may be, what context is needed, what has to be explained, what is obvious by default, which genre fits better, and all that. I have a different portrait for different posts: sometimes it is one specific person, sometimes an image or a team that makes sense to me personally.
So writing a post that I will later publish is easier for me than writing a diary entry or throwing a document into some Obsidian folder.
What I plan to write about
- The experience and knowledge accumulated over roughly ten years since I last structured it in the blog. There are many different small and large things I want to pull out of unconscious competence and turn into text. I did put them into various documents, of course, but a post is a different format.
- Something new that I am working with, something moving from conscious incompetence into something more interesting. For example, I am experimenting with and building a foundation around AI media buyers. This is new to me; I am figuring it out and learning how to work with it. There is plenty of that.
- Tools and technical things: I want it like this, here is the tool, set it up, profit. This may include source-specific workarounds and life hacks.
- Some personal things. Not what I ate or what made me worry, no. My own very personal experience that later melted into something I now use as knowledge, a skill, or a tool. A screwup, like a success, becomes that kind of experience if you have thought about it, of course.
- Remasters or reviews of old posts: some are still relevant with minimal edits, some are naive, some need heavy changes, and some are hopelessly outdated.
—
There was also a forum. Unfortunately, I never managed to dig up its backup, which makes me sad, but I will try to come up with something in its place.
I will try to stick to an ad-free approach. There are a few friendly tools that I use and a few that I help build—I will write about them. Otherwise, as before, I do not plan to run ads, though that may change, of course.
Hard to say how long I will last. I mean with writing posts. We will see.