I feel like sharing thoughts with strangers online gets harder the longer you go without doing it. My plan was to write at least something in August so it wouldn’t be a month without any activity here. Obviously, that didn’t happen. Partly because my month was filled with great people, activities, and weather, and partly because I felt like I needed to write something of value and couldn’t manage to produce anything I was happy with.

As you can see, I decided to solve this issue by posting something about not posting anything. An age-old trick in blogging: blogging about blogging. That being said, I actually believe it helps to keep the sharing muscle from atrophying. These posts don’t cost me anything. I don’t have to be precious about them.

I've been sharing my opinions online since I was 14. Something that has changed over the years is my relationship with the reactions I receive.

When you share something online, people will react. Most of the time, they try to one-up you, either by pointing out something you apparently missed or by flat-out telling you that you're wrong and they know better.

That's not surprising. It's how people operate.

In my early years of blogging, I viewed this behavior as a challenge. My whole personal brand was about "being combative." "Don't feed the trolls" was still a saying back then, and I completely ignored its inherent truth.

It's not just trolls, though. My recent post about filter icons resulted in quite a few reactions, most of them telling me things I already knew. I struggle with people implying I haven't thought about what they're now kindly offering me as new information. It's likely one of those ego things where I feel undervalued if people consider me uninformed.

My first reaction—and I've started and deleted quite a few responses like this over the last couple of days—is to react with some witty "You think you've accomplished something here, but let me show you that you're actually not that smart" remark. It's an asshole move and exactly the behavior I've trained myself to stop doing over the last few years. It's not easy, but it's worth it. Letting things go always feels better than trying to win something that isn't even a competition.

All of this influences my writing. I knew that these reactions would be the result of my short and not very in-depth argued post about filter icons. I could have written a 5,000-word piece on the ins and outs of why the status quo is the way it is, offered alternative icons, and talked about their pros and cons to anticipate those reactions as well. But that wouldn't have been fun. Everything requires a disclaimer.

I would lose my voice if I tried to optimize my writing around the expected reactions. I'd dumb everything down, argue in every direction, just to be safe. That's just not an option. Just like trying to outwit the people reacting to my writing isn't one.

Am I suggesting that you should ignore your readers? Perhaps!

Remember how I proudly proclaimed that I'm done with Wordpress and moved this blog to Astro? Well, that didn't last very long. I still think that Astro is great but it feels like it's better suited for marketing websites and maybe web apps than blogs. The one thing that got me in the end was the fact that I did not manage to create a proper RSS feed with images and other bells and whistles.

I detest influencer culture. I’d rather not be a personal brand but a person. As clear-cut as this might sound, it’s virtually impossible to detach one from the other as soon as you’re visible online. By using marcel.io as the domain for my personal blog, I feel like I somehow slid into influencer territory. At the same time it’s the best name for a personal blog written by a human being called Marcel. Oh well.

Since my urge to start blogging again came up, I ogled tiptop.software as the venue for what I want to write about. I’ve spent most of 2022 learning programming, designed, coded and released an app to the App Store and thought it would be great to write about this under the name Tiptop Software. I installed WordPress, build this theme, wrote the first post and even released it.

However I quickly discovered that writing about cats, games and the weather will undoubtedly be something I want to do (you can look forward to that) and it wouldn’t feel right to put more personal topics into a publication hosted by my “software company”. I also don’t want to limit the frequency of posts to make the blog feel valuable. This isn’t supposed to be one of those blogs where every article has to be a work of art. I want to be able to throw out a quick thought and even end a post in the middle of a senten