By Jack Rhysider: if you’re in IT, I highly encourage you to write a blog. Here are 17 reasons why you should be blogging.🧵👇
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/10/04
I quote the last tweets in the series starting with [Wayback/Archive] Jack Rhysider on Twitter: “If you’re in IT, I highly encourage you to write a blog. Here are 17 reasons why you should be blogging. 🧵👇”
1…17.
So to recap. By blogging you will become a better writer and communicator, learn the concepts better, open new opportunities, have a fantastic notebook for self reference, maybe make money, become appreciated by more people, and show off your IT skills.
So how do you get started? Try these: WordPress, Jekyll, Ghost, Hugo, Medium, Wix, Squarespace. I really don’t care what you use. Just jump in and start blogging. You can always move everything to a different place later. Good luck and I hope to see some new bloggers from this.
and a few ones that came up in the responses:
- [Wayback/Archive] Sage Anthony on Twitter: “@JackRhysider 18. Be creative. There is a significant lack of funny/fantasy/imaginative tech security content. One of my efforts:
chiefsecurity.blog/2021/01/27/bruce-lees-blue-team“
[Wayback/Archive] Bruce Lee’s Blue Team – Chief Security Research
In an alternate universe Bruce Lee did not pass in 1973 but went on to have a massively successful action movie career and founded dozens of martial arts studios throughout north America. Jeet Kune Do (way of the intercepting fist) is one of the most popular martial arts in the USA and after retirement from acting and teaching, Bruce joined Black Hills security to become a Blue Team “cultivation” consultant. In his advanced age he now only does a couple conferences a year via remote connection, but apparently WWHF is bigger than RSA on his side and they are saying his keynote last year set attendance records.
A blog does not need to be about reality. For lots of people, writing fiction is a very good way to balance work/personal life.
- [Wayback/Archive] Jack Rhysider on Twitter: “@m_egan11 Yeah always scrub and anonymize any data like IPs, hostnames, password hashes.”
- [Wayback/Archive] Jack Rhysider on Twitter: “@Dm3k_sec Blogging is way easier.” (than maintaining a YouTube or podcast channel)
- [Wayback/Archive] Privacy & Security on Twitter: “@JackRhysider Good idea, though blogs et al. represent an exposure that brings every “expert” troll to criticize your work. Many ppl have that fear and I get why. Tina Fey said it best “If you ever start to feel too good about yourself, they have this thing called the internet””
- [Wayback/Archive] Salvatore Sparaco on Twitter: “@JackRhysider I just used episode 109 of your Darknet Dairies Podcast as a major reference for a vulnerabilities research paper about the hacktivist group TeaMp0isoN. So thanks for that. What blog sites do you recommend to read and write for if you’re just getting started?” (any will do)
- [Wayback/Archive] Jack Rhysider on Twitter: “@spacemanhank Do it for your own reference. Start by making a resource you would use as a place to look up your favorite commands, configs, walk throughs etc.”
- This was in a response to [Wayback/Archive] SpacemanHank – Noob Security Enthusiast on Twitter: “@JackRhysider I feel Ive missed the boat on documenting a journey into Security… All the journeys, learning checklists, lessons learned etc .. are already blogged about and people have marketed themselves way more … Does it matter if no one reads your blog?”
Basically blog about any topic that you want to be able to find back information on. If you make the blog public, you get interaction. Most interacting people are nice.
- [Wayback/Archive] Tjokker on Twitter: “@JackRhysider Afraid to do it because English is not my first language and I already suck at grammar :p so onenote is my blog :p” two notes here:
- OneNote is perfectly fine: like the above mentioned “there is no no right or wrong”, so if a platform works for you, then it is good enough (see also the response [Wayback/Archive] TechGPrimeZ on Twitter: “@Tjokker255 @JackRhysider One it is my journal/blog and it’s free:)”)
- A blog does not need to be in English or have perfect grammar. Writing in your own primary language is fine, as is making mistakes.
- [Wayback/Archive] JokerFace on Twitter: “@JackRhysider Im definitely too messy on writing my notes to publish them :) I run my own wiki where I put this kind of content in… configs, commands, faced issues, short guides and stuff. Never thought of making it public go be honest” which is a perfectly fine way to blog; it is similar to the non-public part of my blog which has thousands of quick notes.
- [Wayback/Archive] Raouf Adimi on Twitter: “@JackRhysider even for non english speakers they can start one with their local language, still good and would help a lot of people.”
- [Wayback/Archive] md on Twitter: “@RobKnittle @JackRhysider For domains, get them wherever is cheapest. Should be <$10. For hosting, there are a bunch of free static site hosts which are really good and give you free SSL. I personally use @Netlify, but there’s also Github Pages and Cloudflare Pages.”
When this combination had been there in 2009 I just might have used it as it is a both a very nice way to control things and a good way to practice git skills. I already use GitHub and GitLab heavily, have custom pages on my own domains there, see for instance my two blog posts here:- GitLab pages on a custom domain are nice, but be aware of intermittent 502 and certificate errors
- Enabling GitHub pages to a HTML or markdown GitHub project is dead easy: Delphi deadlockempire is now hosted on github.io
I definitely need to look at Netlify as it is git based.
The 17 reasons are both in the thread above and at easier to read in [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @JackRhysider on Thread Reader App.
The above pretty well summarises why I blog:
- A blog is nothing more than a binary log which is web based (hence web log -> weblog -> blog) which is way easier for me to read than my handwriting.
- The binary nature makes it easy to first jot down my notes, then later edit it to be more readable so I can find back what, how and why I did things or found information.
- Having it on-line makes it even easier to search than through the WordPress search mechanism. Google, big and other search engines are so much better than the WordPress one.
- My raw notes are drafts and not public and they might never become public (but they are searchable in my WordPress environment); the current stats as of writing since 2009:
- ~8k published posts
- ~5k draft posts
- ~600 scheduled posts
Yup, the above are from a bunch of Tweets that I responded to one of the above points:
- [Wayback/Archive] “@SalSparaco @JackRhysider Just read any. For instance browse back the the very early beginning of mine at
wiert.me(not sure why there is a “November 22″ entry there, I started in 2009). This is why/how I blog (it will eventually become a blog post): 1/” - [Wayback/Archive] “@SalSparaco @JackRhysider – A blog is nothing more than a binary log which is web based (hence web log -> weblog -> blog) which is way easier for me to read than my handwriting. 2/”
- [Wayback/Archive] “@SalSparaco @JackRhysider – The binary nature makes it easy to first jot down my notes, then later edit it to be more readable so I can find back what, how and why I did things or found information. 3/”
- [Wayback/Archive] “@SalSparaco @JackRhysider – Having it on-line makes it even easier to search than through the WordPress search mechanism. Google, big and other search engines are so much better than the WordPress one. Hope you start one too! /4”
Oh: one of the things that sometimes people think is odd bout my blog is the queue depth: it is some 2 years deep. Having had cancer, I found out that:
- having the blog on auto-pilot frees your mind from it (so it went from some 28 months to 8 months depth while undergoing treatment; the only people noticing were the ones aware that some time after that it went down from multiple posts per workday to a single post per workday)
- most information stays relevant quite a bit longer than one expects: I had very many comments about posts scheduled posts that at the time of posting had wrong information in them
Oh, one more thing: when you refer to external content then be prepared that the link rot rate is astonishingly high. That’s why I save all external content in both the Wayback Machine and Archive.is (not just to have in two places, but especially because lots of content is dynamic and often only archives properly in one of these two).
–jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
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