Title: Blog activity for 2025
Author: Solène
Date: 16 February 2025
Tags: life blog
Description: A bit late, but here are my plans for 2025
# Introduction
Hello, you may have wondered why the blog has not been really active
this year, let's talk about it :-)
# Retrospective
## Patreon
First, I decided to stop the Patreon page for multiple reasons. It was
an interesting experimentation and helped me a lot in 2023 and a part
of 2024 as I went freelance and did not earn much money. Now, the
business is running fine and prefer my former patrons to support
someone else more active / who need money.
The way I implemented Patreon support was like this: people supporting
me financially had access to blog posts a 2 or 3 days earlier than the
public release, the point was to give them a little something for their
support without creating a paywall for some content. I think it worked
quite well in that regard. A side effect of the "early access
publishing" was that, almost every time, I used this extra delay to add
more content / fix issues that I did not think about when writing. As
a reminder, I usually just write then proofread quickly and publish.
Having people paying money to have early access to my blog posts
created some kind of expectations from them in my mind, so I tried to
raise the level higher in terms of content at the point that I came to
procrastinate because "this blog post will not be interesting enough"
or "this will just take too long to write, I'm bored". My writing
cadence got delayed, I was able to sustain once a week at first then
moved to twice a month. I have no idea if readers had "expectations",
but I imagined it and acted like if it was a thing.
For each blog post I was publishing, this also created extra work for
me:
* publish in early access
* write short news about it on Patreon
* wait a few days and republish not in early access
It is not much more work, but this was still more work to think and
schedule.
Cherry on the cake, Patreon was already bloated when I started using
it, but it has been more and more aggressive in terms of marketing and
selling features, which disgusted me at some point. I was not using
all of this, but I felt bad to have people supporting me having to deal
with it.
I used Patreon to publish a "I stop Patreon support but the blog
continues" news, but it seems it is poorly handled on Patreon when you
freeze a creator's page as subscribers are not able to see anything
anymore once you put on freeze?! Sorry for the lack of news, I thought
it was working fine :/
## Different contribution place
The blog started and has lived as the place where I shared my knowledge
during my continuous learning journey. The thing is I learn less
nowadays and more complicated knowledge that is hard to share, because
it is super niche and certainly not fascinating to most, and because
sharing it correctly may be hard.
Most of the blog is about OpenBSD, there were no community place to
share it, so I self-hosted it. Then, I started to write about NixOS
and got invited by the people I worked with at that time (at Tweag
company) to contribute to NixOS documentation, this made sense after
all to not write something only me can update and which can not be
fixed by others. I did it a bit, but also continued my blog in
parallel to share experience and ideas, not really "documentation".
Now I am using Qubes OS daily, for more than a year, I wrote a bit
about it, but I started to contribute actively to community guides
handled on the project's forum. As a result, this made less content to
publish on the blog because it just makes sense to centralize all the
documentation in one place that is manageable by a team instead of
here.
I spent a lot of time contributing to Qubes OS community guides, mostly
about networking/VPN, and early 2025 I officially joined Qubes OS core
team as a documentation maintainer (concretely, this gives commit
rights on some repositories that are website/documentation related).
Qubes OS team is super nice, and the way the work is handled is cool, I
will spend a lot of contribution time there (there is a huge backlog of
changes to review first), still less time and incentive to write here.
## New real job and new place
As stated earlier, I finally found a work place that I enjoy and can
keep me busy, my last two employers were not really able to figure how
to use my weird skill set. I had a lot of time to kill during work in
the previous years, so time to experiment and write, I just have a lot
less time now because I am really busy at work doing cool things.
My family moved to a new place in 2024 as well, there is a lot of work
and gardening to handle, so after this and job work, I just do not have
many things to share about on the blog at the moment.
# Conclusion
The blog is not dead, I think I will be able to resume activity soon
now I turned the page on Patreon and identified why I was not writing
here (I like writing here!).
I have a backlog of ideas, I also may write simpler blog posts when I
would like to share an idea or a cool project without having to cover
it entirely.
Thank you everyone for your support!