The downside of reading a series like People and Blogs every week is that, every week, I contemplate redoing everything about my blog—from the tech stack to the layout to the format. It takes a lot of self control not to “waste” time fiddling with the design or backend.

The upside of reading a series like People and Blogs every week is that, every week, I realize that although blogging is still a very niche “hobby,” there have been a lot of people doing it for a very long time. This is encouraging because when I find those sites and people I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise, I get lost in a rabbit hole of reading the blog posts they wrote, sometimes before I was even alive!

This makes me feel good because I realize (1) everyone goes through constant redesigns of their blog, and (2) the type of stuff they post usually isn’t some world-altering idea, yet it’s interesting and fun to read nonetheless. This encourages me to just keep writing, and see who finds and resonates with it.

The latest guest, Giles Turnbull, was one of those. Turnbull started blogging in the 90s, and his blog has gone through many iterations of design and tech. His current site is just HTML files with “terrible hand-coded CSS.” His posts range from documenting his honeymoon in India in 1995 (! before I was born), to his routine for taking care of a baby, to thinking about the permanence and tradeoffs of using a hosted CMS system. There isn’t really a “theme” to his blog, other than the fact that he thought about the posts, and then he wrote them.

Some people think your blog needs to be more. I don’t. A blog is your website. If other people like it, great! If not, they can visit the million other sites online.

This goes for other web projects as well. There was lately some “beef” about how Manu hosts the People and Blog series. Someone thought sending pre-formatted questions via email was not the proper way to conduct an interview. And they’re right. But Manu isn’t conducting “proper interviews,” his goals are:

This series has two goals. The first, is to highlight wonderful and creative human beings and their blogs, helping you discover new content to read. And the second, is to show how social media is not the only way to inhabit the web.

If you don’t like how he does it, go find another series to read! Or, again, visit the million other websites on the internet.

I don’t like the TV shows my wife watches—Selling Sunset, Keeping up with the Kardashians, Real Housewives—because they’re annoying. But there are a million other TV shows and movies—and things to be doing with my time—that are way more productive than writing emails or blog posts about how I don’t like those shows.

Make a blog what you want to make it. Make an online project whatever you want to make it. There are no rules. (Other than be kind!)