6 ms·

Alex Payne, a Twitter engineer, is shutting down his personal blog

dschobel 17y ago
Of course, I’ll be tweeting away. Over time, I’m coming to realize what sort of messages I can communicate effectively via Twitter, and what sort I can’t. Twitter works least well for me when I try to cram big arguments down to 140 characters. But isn't twitter the medium which caused him the most grief (the techcrunch manufactured-drama of last week) specifically when he tried to convey a big idea in too short a space?
k7d 17y ago
2010.. the year of blogquiting? :)
- kloncks 17y ago
  126 million blogs are online... I really feel that that number will only continue to increase as more and more people get online and stop worrying about privacy too much. Mishaps like this are tragic. Misinterpretation and misunderstanding are bad things...but for the most part, these things are rare.
- dschobel 17y ago
  and facebook quitting: http://www.seppukoo.com/ http://www.seppukoo.com/ I wonder if the twitter guys are concerned about the logical next step in this reversal of over-exposure.
  - RyanMcGreal 17y ago
    Heh. I'm seriously considering quitting twitter right now.
eam 17y ago
I wonder if Joel Spolsky had some influence on Alex. I really enjoyed his blog.
- mikedouglas 17y ago
  I'm sure the blatant misreading of his tweet by techcrunch last week had something to do with it. http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/27/new-twitter-features/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/27/new-twitter-features/
  - kloncks 17y ago
    As horrible and blatant TechCrunch might have been, it's not even 1/100 as bad as Silicon Alley Insider, which ran the following headline following the story: "Twitter Rolling Out New Website To Kill TweetDeck and Other Third Party Clients" http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-twitter-rolling-out-new-web-site-to-kill-tweetdeck-and-other-third-party-clients-2010-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-twitter-rolling...
  - zaidf 17y ago
    I'd call it anything but "blatant misreading." Everyone knows the massive hype surrounding Twitter's api. There are companies who've raised millions banking on twitter api. While I think that's bad strategy for those companies, I don't blame a bunch of folks with millions on the line to panic at a tweet from a twitter employee that threatens their existence. If I'm one of the companies that depends on twitter, I'd want to know everything behind that tweet. It's forgivable if Alex overlooked that perspective but this is by no means techcrunch's fault. They reported what he tweeted. Partner relationships are very sensitive. I have a product that is being sold by a reseller who has two sales people pushing it. One of the sales people heard a rumor from somewhere(a classmate) that we might be selling directly in the market so he would have to compete with our in-house sales staff for the same business. He contacted us in panic. We had to assure him that while we do plan to do in-house sales, that is for other markets. Point is, when you have good partnerships that are not just fluff, you also need solid communication. If developers didn't care about the twitter api, they wouldn't give a shit about this tweet. Because they care about it, twitter should be very sensitive to how they communicate with developers.
    - shaddi 17y ago
      Yeah, you have a point, but Alex Payne obviously felt it was misinterpreted, and it's pretty easy to see how that might motivate him to stop blogging (dare I say, be less private online, ironically enough).
davidw 17y ago
I wonder if he'll last through the winter in Portland.
- al3x 17y ago
  I grew up on the East Coast. I can deal with harsh winters. Plus, I'm only happy when it rains.
  - davidw 17y ago
    The winters in the Pacific Northwest aren't "harsh", just long, bleak and gray. After a few winters in Innsbruck, Austria, I actually learned that I don't mind the snow and intense cold. However, it rarely snows in Portland, it just rains, and drizzles, and drips, and mists and then starts the cycle anew. I guess if you like the rain, though, that's the right place for you (surpassed only by Washington's Olympic Peninsula). As a native Oregonian, though, I think you're crazy to like the rain - you can't do much of anything outdoors without getting really miserably wet. I can see getting out of the bay area, on the other hand - Portland is certainly more livable. Good luck!
pmikal 17y ago
I shut down my blog Jan 1. Privacy is the new sharing.
- erlanger 17y ago
  P'sha, the cool kids shut down their social network accounts in '08.
  - aaronblohowiak 17y ago
    P'sha is actually "pshaw" and it goes back to 1656: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pshaw http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pshaw
    - erlanger 17y ago
      That's a solid 93/100 on the etymology awesome scale.
- al3x 17y ago
  You're joking, but honestly, I really do think there's going to be a wave of private/closed-community products that counterbalance the boom in highly social technology over the past few years.
  - uggedal 17y ago
    Like http://pinboard.in http://pinboard.in - "Social bookmarking for introverts"
marshallp 17y ago
Perhaps these tech blogger/entrepreneurs will get round to doing real work now. Streams of messages (twitter) and bug tracking (frog creek) is great n all, but how about something with more than a handful of features?
- phsr 17y ago
  Because everyone should make a product with every feature imaginable! Why would you need anything else? Feature bloat doesn't hurt any product!
  - marshallp 17y ago
    It'd be nice if the tech industry got innovative and solved real human problems - you know, like getting computers to do the work of humans. Reinventions of the telegraph (twitter/facebook) and operating system (apple/android/chromeos) is all i'm seeing these days.
    - bugs 17y ago
      As much as I hate twitter it most definitely is not a reinvention of the telegraph For the operating system snark I for one am glad the world isn't still using apple II's If you want the problems solved start working on it yourself it isn't other peoples burden.
      - marshallp 17y ago
        Twitter doesn't do my dishes, or cure cancer. It just lets people communicate, like did the telegraph 200 years ago. Operating system snark - beneath os x and android is unix, invented over 40 years ago. I do work on it myself, but i'm only one man. If the industry set its goals higher that would make a real difference, and put more money in its pocket.
        bugs 17y ago
        I'm sorry that you see the world that way but not everyone can cure cancer or build robots and to be honest most don't want to. If you are using any operating system other than the unix invented 40 years ago then I think there is a reason for new operating systems and I stick with my opinion. An airplane is just based on some flying contraption people built 100 years ago but there is a reason we built new ones.
sker 17y ago
I can't believe this is on the front page and at number 2. Hacker News has officially jumped the shark for me. Yes, down vote me all you want.
- pg 17y ago
  I feel like I've read this exact same comment so many times over the past 3 years. If you think something's off topic, would you please just flag it quietly, as we ask in the guidelines?
  - sker 17y ago
    That's what I usually do, but this time is different. This marks the end of HN as I knew it (for me anyway), and I felt the need to express how I feel about it. You don't just lose something you cherish and stay quiet, that's a very difficult thing to do. You won't be hearing this sort of complaints from me anymore.
    - pg 17y ago
      Well, if it's any consolation, it was just an illusion that the site was good before. HN officially jumped the shark about three months after you signed up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244937 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244937 It's interesting that this too was a complaint about yet another story of a type that there had recently been a lot of. That seems to be the most common thing that causes people to decide that this time, HN has really jumped the shark. Sometimes sites get onto themes. Lately one theme has been prominent bloggers who are quitting blogging. Don't worry, though. There probably won't be that many more.
      - vital101 17y ago
        There will always be people that don't like a site's content. If that is the case, I feel they should try to help add better content. Hacker News is still a small enough community where the actions of 1 person can be felt throughout the whole thing. Also, a fair amount of people seem to care that this is happening, so why wouldn't it get on the front page? It seems to me that the submission guidelines are somewhat flexible to account for this sort of thing.
cwilson 17y ago
Way too much cynicism in this thread! I thought that was a great way to put on hold a blog I've always enjoyed reading over the last few years. Congrats and best of luck, Alex.
- raganwald 17y ago
  Way too much indeed. We should remember that blogs are written for an audience and that audience may not be HN. If a post doesn't satisfy us as a community, the fault is not with the author's composition but with the choice to submit the link to HN. A similar thing happened to me when I wrote a rememberence-day post. Some people reasonably suggested it wasn't Hacker News. I explained why I thought it was tangentially relevant. There was a discussion about that, but nobody suggested that I shouldn't have written the post, we were merely discussing whether it belonged in HN. I can understand the argument that meta-blogging doesn't belong in HN. But I don't believe it shouldn't be written in the first place.
josefresco 17y ago
Someone needs to whip up a quick mad-libs style "I'm quitting blogging" script that can write these posts for us all. Also a list of public blog-quitters so we can ridicule them when they change their minds: http://calacanis.com/2008/07/11/official-announcement-regarding-my-retirement-from-blogging/ http://calacanis.com/2008/07/11/official-announcement-regard... http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100301/lets-take-this-offline.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100301/lets-take-this-offline.... http://al3x.net/2010/03/02/hiatus.html http://al3x.net/2010/03/02/hiatus.html
- decklin 17y ago
  Not reading the linked article I expect, but not reading the one-word summary in the article's URL? http://lmgtfy.com/?q=hiatus http://lmgtfy.com/?q=hiatus Edit: to be fair, the title of this submission is misrepresenting.
Willie_Dynamite 17y ago
So? Maybe flippant, but that's the nature of the blogging beast. Blogs come and go, new ones replace old ones and somehow equilibrium is maintained.
- scott_s 17y ago
  The So? is that Alex is a member of our community and some people here will care about why he chose to stop.
mdg 17y ago
Congratulations on getting married.
Vitaly 17y ago
an advice to the next person that wants to stop blogging. just stop. really. don't blog about you wanting to stop. thanks.
- jackowayed 17y ago
  Really? Let's say you're a loyal reader. You have him RSSed, and you get excited whenever you see his posts show up in your feed reader. How would you feel if after a month or 2 you said "hm, Alex Payne hasn't blogged in a long time, wonder what the deal is." You go to twitter: "@al3x why haven't you been blogging recently?" "@you I decided to stop blogging" Wouldn't you wish he had written one final blog post letting you know instead of waiting for people to figure it out? To an outsider who just sees his posts occasionally on HN, it may seem dumb, but it makes more sense for his loyal readers, I assume. A lot of HN readers and empathize like so: what if pg "just stopped" writing/publishing essays. Wouldn't you wish he had at least written one last amazing essay describing his rationale for stopping and letting everyone know?
  - ramchip 17y ago
    The real WTF, as they say, is that this would shoot up the HN main page. It's good for his loyal readers that he makes a conclusion posts, but there's not really a point in posting this on HN so that people who don't read his blog can know.
  - al3x 17y ago
    That's pretty much it. I have people who read my blog regularly, and if I didn't explain why I was taking a break, they'd want to know. I didn't intend the post to be on HN. I didn't submit the post to HN. I didn't upvote the post on HN.
- nfnaaron 17y ago
  Are you supposed to just disappear? I think it's polite to your readers to mention it. How you write the mention is entirely up to you and your style.
- raganwald 17y ago
avdempsey 17y ago
This is Alex's best post since he bashed SF. All is forgiven, sorry for getting unintentionally inflamed!
gyardley 17y ago
"When we started dating, marriage was the furthest thing from my mind. True love will sneak up on you. Let it." True and beautifully put.
scott_s 17y ago
Alex, I know you contribute on HN, and I'd just like to say I think some of the people here are being rude. With that said, some (unsolicited, I know) advice for if you want to get back into blogging. Try getting feedback from your peers before publishing something, then use their input to edit. That should improve the writing, of course, but it can also indicate to you if the ideas you want to get across are apparent to the readers you care about. Not everyone who reads your essays will even be willing to meet you on your own terms. Getting feedback from peers - as opposed to random people who feel it's okay to dismiss soemthing out-of-hand - may help with the feeling that your writing doesn't provide the insight you want it to. This is, I think, closer to how PG approaches his essays. Notice, too, that we don't consider those blogs, but essays that pop up periodically.
- al3x 17y ago
  Getting feedback on posts before I publish has been valuable. If and when I get back to blogging, I'll be soliciting that peer feedback for each and every post. Great advice. Thanks!
kvs 17y ago
Let me just say just because we have lot of ideas doesn't mean they all need to crystalize. I've learned that I might be thinking of an idea for a month or some whereas someone else might have thought about it for four months, tired & failed so they will criticize the idea and drive it in a different direction. Not every idea needs to crystalize. I do agree that blogging every other day is not going to help either. I would say blog like Dustin Curtis. Treat every post like a book. As for my street cred: I quit blogging in 2001 after 3-4 years of blogging. Now, thinking of doing what I just proposed above. :-)
joshu 17y ago
I think that blogging, especially the feedback you get from a successful post, tend to be seductive. So you continually think about that next blog post, even when you have nothing to say. This is why I've decided to just write to get something out of my head and there's no other outlet.

Of course, I’ll be tweeting away. Over time, I’m coming to realize what sort of messages I can communicate effectively via Twitter, and what sort I can’t. Twitter works least well for me when I try to cram big arguments down to 140 characters. But isn't twitter the medium which caused him the most grief (the techcrunch manufactured-drama of last week) specifically when he tried to convey a big idea in too short a space?

k7d 17y ago

2010.. the year of blogquiting? :)

kloncks 17y ago
126 million blogs are online... I really feel that that number will only continue to increase as more and more people get online and stop worrying about privacy too much. Mishaps like this are tragic. Misinterpretation and misunderstanding are bad things...but for the most part, these things are rare.
dschobel 17y ago
and facebook quitting: http://www.seppukoo.com/ http://www.seppukoo.com/ I wonder if the twitter guys are concerned about the logical next step in this reversal of over-exposure.
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
  Heh. I'm seriously considering quitting twitter right now.

eam 17y ago

I wonder if Joel Spolsky had some influence on Alex. I really enjoyed his blog.

mikedouglas 17y ago
I'm sure the blatant misreading of his tweet by techcrunch last week had something to do with it. http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/27/new-twitter-features/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/27/new-twitter-features/
- kloncks 17y ago
  As horrible and blatant TechCrunch might have been, it's not even 1/100 as bad as Silicon Alley Insider, which ran the following headline following the story: "Twitter Rolling Out New Website To Kill TweetDeck and Other Third Party Clients" http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-twitter-rolling-out-new-web-site-to-kill-tweetdeck-and-other-third-party-clients-2010-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-twitter-rolling...
- zaidf 17y ago
  I'd call it anything but "blatant misreading." Everyone knows the massive hype surrounding Twitter's api. There are companies who've raised millions banking on twitter api. While I think that's bad strategy for those companies, I don't blame a bunch of folks with millions on the line to panic at a tweet from a twitter employee that threatens their existence. If I'm one of the companies that depends on twitter, I'd want to know everything behind that tweet. It's forgivable if Alex overlooked that perspective but this is by no means techcrunch's fault. They reported what he tweeted. Partner relationships are very sensitive. I have a product that is being sold by a reseller who has two sales people pushing it. One of the sales people heard a rumor from somewhere(a classmate) that we might be selling directly in the market so he would have to compete with our in-house sales staff for the same business. He contacted us in panic. We had to assure him that while we do plan to do in-house sales, that is for other markets. Point is, when you have good partnerships that are not just fluff, you also need solid communication. If developers didn't care about the twitter api, they wouldn't give a shit about this tweet. Because they care about it, twitter should be very sensitive to how they communicate with developers.
  - shaddi 17y ago
    Yeah, you have a point, but Alex Payne obviously felt it was misinterpreted, and it's pretty easy to see how that might motivate him to stop blogging (dare I say, be less private online, ironically enough).

davidw 17y ago

I wonder if he'll last through the winter in Portland.

al3x 17y ago
I grew up on the East Coast. I can deal with harsh winters. Plus, I'm only happy when it rains.
- davidw 17y ago
  The winters in the Pacific Northwest aren't "harsh", just long, bleak and gray. After a few winters in Innsbruck, Austria, I actually learned that I don't mind the snow and intense cold. However, it rarely snows in Portland, it just rains, and drizzles, and drips, and mists and then starts the cycle anew. I guess if you like the rain, though, that's the right place for you (surpassed only by Washington's Olympic Peninsula). As a native Oregonian, though, I think you're crazy to like the rain - you can't do much of anything outdoors without getting really miserably wet. I can see getting out of the bay area, on the other hand - Portland is certainly more livable. Good luck!

pmikal 17y ago

I shut down my blog Jan 1. Privacy is the new sharing.

erlanger 17y ago
P'sha, the cool kids shut down their social network accounts in '08.
- aaronblohowiak 17y ago
  P'sha is actually "pshaw" and it goes back to 1656: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pshaw http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pshaw
  - erlanger 17y ago
    That's a solid 93/100 on the etymology awesome scale.
al3x 17y ago
You're joking, but honestly, I really do think there's going to be a wave of private/closed-community products that counterbalance the boom in highly social technology over the past few years.
- uggedal 17y ago
  Like http://pinboard.in http://pinboard.in - "Social bookmarking for introverts"

marshallp 17y ago

Perhaps these tech blogger/entrepreneurs will get round to doing real work now. Streams of messages (twitter) and bug tracking (frog creek) is great n all, but how about something with more than a handful of features?

phsr 17y ago
Because everyone should make a product with every feature imaginable! Why would you need anything else? Feature bloat doesn't hurt any product!
- marshallp 17y ago
  It'd be nice if the tech industry got innovative and solved real human problems - you know, like getting computers to do the work of humans. Reinventions of the telegraph (twitter/facebook) and operating system (apple/android/chromeos) is all i'm seeing these days.
  - bugs 17y ago
    As much as I hate twitter it most definitely is not a reinvention of the telegraph For the operating system snark I for one am glad the world isn't still using apple II's If you want the problems solved start working on it yourself it isn't other peoples burden.
    - marshallp 17y ago
      Twitter doesn't do my dishes, or cure cancer. It just lets people communicate, like did the telegraph 200 years ago. Operating system snark - beneath os x and android is unix, invented over 40 years ago. I do work on it myself, but i'm only one man. If the industry set its goals higher that would make a real difference, and put more money in its pocket.
      - bugs 17y ago
        I'm sorry that you see the world that way but not everyone can cure cancer or build robots and to be honest most don't want to. If you are using any operating system other than the unix invented 40 years ago then I think there is a reason for new operating systems and I stick with my opinion. An airplane is just based on some flying contraption people built 100 years ago but there is a reason we built new ones.

sker 17y ago

I can't believe this is on the front page and at number 2. Hacker News has officially jumped the shark for me. Yes, down vote me all you want.

pg 17y ago
I feel like I've read this exact same comment so many times over the past 3 years. If you think something's off topic, would you please just flag it quietly, as we ask in the guidelines?
- sker 17y ago
  That's what I usually do, but this time is different. This marks the end of HN as I knew it (for me anyway), and I felt the need to express how I feel about it. You don't just lose something you cherish and stay quiet, that's a very difficult thing to do. You won't be hearing this sort of complaints from me anymore.
  - pg 17y ago
    Well, if it's any consolation, it was just an illusion that the site was good before. HN officially jumped the shark about three months after you signed up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244937 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244937 It's interesting that this too was a complaint about yet another story of a type that there had recently been a lot of. That seems to be the most common thing that causes people to decide that this time, HN has really jumped the shark. Sometimes sites get onto themes. Lately one theme has been prominent bloggers who are quitting blogging. Don't worry, though. There probably won't be that many more.
    - vital101 17y ago
      There will always be people that don't like a site's content. If that is the case, I feel they should try to help add better content. Hacker News is still a small enough community where the actions of 1 person can be felt throughout the whole thing. Also, a fair amount of people seem to care that this is happening, so why wouldn't it get on the front page? It seems to me that the submission guidelines are somewhat flexible to account for this sort of thing.

cwilson 17y ago

Way too much cynicism in this thread! I thought that was a great way to put on hold a blog I've always enjoyed reading over the last few years. Congrats and best of luck, Alex.

raganwald 17y ago
Way too much indeed. We should remember that blogs are written for an audience and that audience may not be HN. If a post doesn't satisfy us as a community, the fault is not with the author's composition but with the choice to submit the link to HN. A similar thing happened to me when I wrote a rememberence-day post. Some people reasonably suggested it wasn't Hacker News. I explained why I thought it was tangentially relevant. There was a discussion about that, but nobody suggested that I shouldn't have written the post, we were merely discussing whether it belonged in HN. I can understand the argument that meta-blogging doesn't belong in HN. But I don't believe it shouldn't be written in the first place.

josefresco 17y ago

Someone needs to whip up a quick mad-libs style "I'm quitting blogging" script that can write these posts for us all. Also a list of public blog-quitters so we can ridicule them when they change their minds: http://calacanis.com/2008/07/11/official-announcement-regarding-my-retirement-from-blogging/ http://calacanis.com/2008/07/11/official-announcement-regard... http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100301/lets-take-this-offline.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100301/lets-take-this-offline.... http://al3x.net/2010/03/02/hiatus.html http://al3x.net/2010/03/02/hiatus.html

decklin 17y ago
Not reading the linked article I expect, but not reading the one-word summary in the article's URL? http://lmgtfy.com/?q=hiatus http://lmgtfy.com/?q=hiatus Edit: to be fair, the title of this submission is misrepresenting.

Willie_Dynamite 17y ago

So? Maybe flippant, but that's the nature of the blogging beast. Blogs come and go, new ones replace old ones and somehow equilibrium is maintained.

scott_s 17y ago
The So? is that Alex is a member of our community and some people here will care about why he chose to stop.

mdg 17y ago

Congratulations on getting married.

Vitaly 17y ago

an advice to the next person that wants to stop blogging. just stop. really. don't blog about you wanting to stop. thanks.

jackowayed 17y ago
Really? Let's say you're a loyal reader. You have him RSSed, and you get excited whenever you see his posts show up in your feed reader. How would you feel if after a month or 2 you said "hm, Alex Payne hasn't blogged in a long time, wonder what the deal is." You go to twitter: "@al3x why haven't you been blogging recently?" "@you I decided to stop blogging" Wouldn't you wish he had written one final blog post letting you know instead of waiting for people to figure it out? To an outsider who just sees his posts occasionally on HN, it may seem dumb, but it makes more sense for his loyal readers, I assume. A lot of HN readers and empathize like so: what if pg "just stopped" writing/publishing essays. Wouldn't you wish he had at least written one last amazing essay describing his rationale for stopping and letting everyone know?
- ramchip 17y ago
  The real WTF, as they say, is that this would shoot up the HN main page. It's good for his loyal readers that he makes a conclusion posts, but there's not really a point in posting this on HN so that people who don't read his blog can know.
- al3x 17y ago
  That's pretty much it. I have people who read my blog regularly, and if I didn't explain why I was taking a break, they'd want to know. I didn't intend the post to be on HN. I didn't submit the post to HN. I didn't upvote the post on HN.
nfnaaron 17y ago
Are you supposed to just disappear? I think it's polite to your readers to mention it. How you write the mention is entirely up to you and your style.
raganwald 17y ago

avdempsey 17y ago

This is Alex's best post since he bashed SF. All is forgiven, sorry for getting unintentionally inflamed!

gyardley 17y ago

"When we started dating, marriage was the furthest thing from my mind. True love will sneak up on you. Let it." True and beautifully put.

scott_s 17y ago

Alex, I know you contribute on HN, and I'd just like to say I think some of the people here are being rude. With that said, some (unsolicited, I know) advice for if you want to get back into blogging. Try getting feedback from your peers before publishing something, then use their input to edit. That should improve the writing, of course, but it can also indicate to you if the ideas you want to get across are apparent to the readers you care about. Not everyone who reads your essays will even be willing to meet you on your own terms. Getting feedback from peers - as opposed to random people who feel it's okay to dismiss soemthing out-of-hand - may help with the feeling that your writing doesn't provide the insight you want it to. This is, I think, closer to how PG approaches his essays. Notice, too, that we don't consider those blogs, but essays that pop up periodically.

al3x 17y ago
Getting feedback on posts before I publish has been valuable. If and when I get back to blogging, I'll be soliciting that peer feedback for each and every post. Great advice. Thanks!

kvs 17y ago

Let me just say just because we have lot of ideas doesn't mean they all need to crystalize. I've learned that I might be thinking of an idea for a month or some whereas someone else might have thought about it for four months, tired & failed so they will criticize the idea and drive it in a different direction. Not every idea needs to crystalize. I do agree that blogging every other day is not going to help either. I would say blog like Dustin Curtis. Treat every post like a book. As for my street cred: I quit blogging in 2001 after 3-4 years of blogging. Now, thinking of doing what I just proposed above. :-)

joshu 17y ago

I think that blogging, especially the feedback you get from a successful post, tend to be seductive. So you continually think about that next blog post, even when you have nothing to say. This is why I've decided to just write to get something out of my head and there's no other outlet.