The New Leaf Journal celebrated its sixth birthday on April 27, 2026. To celebrate our website’s sixth birthday, I decided to undertake writing a series of six articles on wisdom I have accumulated from running and writing for NLJ. I will begin this series on the sixth anniversary of the publication of the first NLJ article published under my name: The benefits of blogging (or writing online).
Why Run a Blog or Online Writing Website?
I thought about publishing a subject examining why one may want to run a writing website (I maintain The New Leaf Journal is an online writing magazine) or blog, or otherwise participate in a multi-person online writing project. However, I opted against the straight-forward version of this idea for two reasons. Firstly, it is not the case that everyone needs to run a writing website, blog, or to publish online at all. There are many potential creative and technical endeavors available to undertake, after all. For people who, like me, run writing websites, blogs, or otherwise publish their own work online, there are any number of reasons why someone may want to do so and many forms such a project may take. A person who is sharing knowledge with a technical or cooking blog or who is maintaining a mid-2000s-style online diary may have different reasons for doing so and aspirations than I do writing about whatever I want to cover here at The New Leaf Journal.
However, while I do not think that my telling people why they should publish their writing online would be particularly interesting or instructive, I thought of what I think is a more interesting variation of that basic idea. Instead of telling you why you should blog or publish online (or continue doing so if you are way ahead of the prompt), I thought it would be interesting to focus on the personal benefits one may accrue from online writing endeavors. I will write from my own perspective, but with reference to interesting essays by online writers from around the web. Moreover, we can consider how some of the benefits that attach to blogging and writing on the internet may apply to other creative endeavors, and perhaps why accompanying other creative endeavors with an online writing project may be worthwhile.
With our introduction aside and our project now clarified, let us consider the benefits of blogging and writing online.
Seeing the World Through the Eyes of a Blogger or Online Writer
On September 27, 2012, James Somers made the case in essay form that More people should write:
You should write because when you know that you’re going to write, it changes the way you live.
More specifically, Mr. Somers suggested that publishing one’s writing online can change the way one relates to the world. To illustrate, he used the example of a botanist or zoologist working in the field. For the botanist or zoologist, writing and publishing online “the site of a collision between a mind and a world.” The writer, whether he or she runs a blog, online writing magazine, or is making books or video games, can relate to the world in the same way. As Mr. Somers put it:
That’s the promise: you will live more curiously if you write. You will become a scientist, if not of the natural world than of whatever world you care about. More of that world will pop alive. You will see more when you look at it.
In Taking Blogging Seriously, Tom Critchlow offered his own take-away from Mr. Somers’ description of the benefits of blogging as an artform:
Of course blogging isn’t just writing. It’s a way of seeing the world with fresh eyes. Blogging is a mindset.
I found both Messrs. Somers’ and Critchlow’s positions on point with my own experience running The New Leaf Journal, as I explained in a reply post to Mr. Critchlow’s quote on ECS:
I use things I read or see in the world around me as inspiration for new article ideas and topics, and writing about one thing often leads to trying another. To those who may be interested in trying their hand at writing online (or some other online creative endeavor) but refrain for want of ideas, I submit that I would have almost certainly never researched the shadowy character named BLOB DYLAN, anime hair color, or PumpkinOS (just to name a small number of examples out of many articles) without having built a digital home or two.
There are many other silly and serious examples in my ever-growing archive. On the silly side, we have the case of the Brooklyn banana bench I photographed and wrote about in 2021, and again on April 30, 2026. While I am sure that many people walked by that banana bench and had a laugh, my first thought was to share it with my New Leaf Journal guests. When I found that it had lost all of its color five years after I published my original article, I thought that I should cover that too, bringing together my past work with a number of new (and old) links from around the web.
For more serious observation-based examples, I photographed and wrote about two boats docked at Brooklyn Bridge Park: the Alfred E. Smith and Victory Chimes. In writing about these boats, I dug into their respective histories and ultimately published what I hope were interesting articles about their stories.
Running a writing website has also changed how I read online. An interesting essay or article on the web can give rise to my own project. Leading into our sixth birthday, I published Staying the Course in Writing in the LLM Moment, wherein I concurred with several online defenses of the em-dash against the new popular opinion that em-dashes are presumptively mark indicators of “AI” writing, and I encouraged fellow human writers on the internet to “stay the course” in writing in their own voices, for the best way to make the case for humane writing is to write well. In Attending to Surroundings and Thoughts on Walks, I turned my disagreement with a point in praise of using walks to listen to informational podcasts into an article about the benefits of attending to the walks as you are walking. That walking essay ties into the above paragraphs where I noted examples of article projects that grew out of observations I made while walking.
The “mindset” that Mr. Critchlow referenced has also inspired me to turn some of my memories and past experiences into new ideas. For example, I turned a personal anecdote from the heyday of Poké-mania in 1999 into a reflection on how certain aspects of the original Pokémon phenomenon were very much grounded in the world that was in 1998-99, and would have played out differently (in the United States, at least) a few years earlier or a few years later.
Writing About Your Interests and Discovering New Interests
Back in 2001, Rebecca Blood wrote Weblogs: A History and Perspective. This article, or blog post, is of historic interest because of how she contemporaneously covered the early blogging scene. But for our purposes, let us focus on her personal perspective as an early blogger:
Shortly after I began producing Rebecca’s Pocket I noticed two side effects I had not expected. First, I discovered my own interests. I thought I knew what I was interested in, but after linking stories for a few months I could see that I was much more interested in science, archaeology, and issues of injustice than I had realized. More importantly, I began to value more highly my own point of view. In composing my link text every day I carefully considered my own opinions and ideas, and I began to feel that my perspective was unique and important.
To be sure, Mr. Blood had interests that she wanted to share and write about when she started Rebecca’s Pocket. But through the process of collecting links from around the web to share on her blog, she became interested, or more interested than she had been before, in topics that she was sharing links about. Moreover, publishing her own thoughts online led her to begin to value her own perspective more than she had before. But from a careful reading of her post, she was not only saying that she valued her pre-existing perspective more, but also that she valued the perspective she cultivated when “carefully consider[ing] [her] own opinions and ideas” while sharing external links and thoughts on her blog.
More than two decades after Rebecca’s Pocket peaked and faded, I had some similar experiences to Ms. Blood. Like Ms. Blood, I became more interested in a number of topics since starting The New Leaf Journal.
Tech provides any number of examples. I switched from running Windows 10 to Linux not long after starting The New Leaf Journal, and with that I started to use different software and services than I had previously. The prospect of writing about them led me to become interested in, and learn about, many tech-related topics in ways that I may not have done so without writing for The New Leaf Journal. I doubt that I would be drafting my writing (including job-related writing) in markdown had I not come across it for reasons related to my New Leaf Journal work. I may not have had as much incentive to try a significant number of free and open source Android apps or come up with creative custom search engine shortcut ideas without New Leaf Journal.
For a non-tech example, I have often turned to freely available materials on Project Gutenberg to inspire article ideas. On one such occasion, I stumbled upon an early twentieth century Abraham Lincoln poem by a certain Charlotte Becker. I had originally planned to write an article just about that poem. However, when I looked into Becker’s biography, I became aware that I could find many of her poems, most of which were published in the first two decades of the twentieth century, online with the help of a now-defunct tool that I had stumbled upon while researching a different New Leaf Journal project. That discovery turned my idea to write a short post covering one of Becker’s poems into a long article re-printing a significant chunk of her poetic corpus, with my additional commentary.
Writing online has also prompted me to look at things I already enjoyed in new ways. For example, I published a December 2020 article about my recommended anime series of the 2011-20 decade, evincing the fact that my interest in anime long-predates the launch of The New Leaf Journal. But prior to running NLJ, I had never thought much about anime hair color. Not long before I published that anime article, I read a chapter of the Oregairu light novels wherein the narrator character made a specific point of highlighting that one of his Japanese classmates appeared to have naturally brown hair. I would have noted the line and point of emphasis as interesting even without The New Leaf Journal, but I would not have had reason to do anything more than that. I thought of that hair color note when I read an article about a real-world issue that a Japanese girl had in middle school on account of her naturally brown hair. Because I had the light novel story in mind, I wrote an article about hair color and school dress codes in Japan, and then, because I had covered real-world hair color-dress code issues, I turned the light novel passage into an article. That light novel passage turned into a long-running series wherein I look at how Japanese anime, manga, and games treat unusual hair colors — and I now notice things about hair color in media that I would have most likely over looked without The New Leaf Journal.
Similarly to anime, I had also been interested in visual novels before starting The New Leaf Journal. One of my longest-running projects was covering, and reviewing, 31 localizations of freeware indie Japanese visual novels that had been completed in English from 2005-08. I had that project in mind because I had played a few of those visual novel localizations many years before starting The New Leaf Journal. But through that project, I learned many things about visual novels that I had not known previously. For example, I learned about, and started considering, the engines underlying those visual novels, and I had to learn about some of their quirks in order to run as many as possible natively on Linux. I also took a greater interest in how localizations are handled (including the distinction between “translation” and “localization”).
Blogging and Learning
The above two points lead into a third benefit of blogging and writing online: Learning. I present the following quote from Leticia Portella’s Why you should have a blog (and write in it):
Writing is an excellent tool for learning. When you decide to write a blog post about what you are learning, not only you need to understand it well enough to make it clear, but also you need to create a structure for the post, which helps you structure your studies in the meantime.
I could not agree more. That working to understand something well enough to explain it to others is a good learning method is self-evident enough that I need not elaborate here. But Ms. Portella’s secound point, “you need to create a structure for the post, which helps you structure your studies…” is worth an additional quote. For that additional quote, we turn to Pablo Enoc’s recent essay On AI-enhanced Writing:
[M]oving things around is precisely what thinking and writing involves. It’s where ideas are born and cultivated, shaped to become what we have in mind. The rearranging of words to capture an incipient thought is the struggle and joy of being a writer.
I am not interested in focusing on “AI” in this particular post, but this passage of Mr. Enoc’s stands on its own as being valuable without an AI antagonist. It is one thing to have knowledge about something or voluminous notes, but another thing entirely to be able to organize that knowledge or those notes into a clear and coherent essay. To use a New Leaf Journal example, I would say that the heaviest research-style article I put together was my 2024 essay on Halloween in Japan. That essay came together over a few weeks wherein I collected articles and research papers covering different aspects of Halloween in Japan. I worked through the materials, taking notes and excerpting passages I was considering using. Then I decided which articles and quotes to use in the final product. Finally, I thought carefully about how to organize all of the information I collected, which spanned from twentieth century Japanese history to recent articles about snack promotions, into a logical order that would make for good and informative reading for guests of The New Leaf Journal. Through organizing the information I collected, I gained a clearer understanding of the history and growth of Halloween in Japan than I would have had I just haphazardly read articles and saved quotes.
Fittingly on The New Leaf Journal’s birthday, Martin Adams published an article titled Why You Take Notes But Never Get Smarter. In the article, he describes coming to the conclusion that notwithstanding his prior prolific note taking, he found himself forgetting information that he had meticulously taken down in notes. The reason, he concluded, was because “the note-taking system that I’ve adopted isn’t designed to make me think.” Mr. Adams suggested an alternative approach: “The reality is that learning doesn’t happen when you consume, it happens when you process and re-express what you’re discovering.”
While Mr. Adams’ article was not about blogging and writing online per se, I would add as a benefit of blogging in the broad learning category that publishing online is a way to turn notes into action. One may not have a specific work-related use-case for things he or she learns online. For example, my actual job involves legal research and writing in the area of U.S. immigration law. While I have written a few New Leaf Journal articles touching on areas related to my profession, it should go without saying that the vast majority of my online writing corpus has no direct or tangential relationship to my day job. But I enjoy reading and learning new things, and being able to write about what I read and learn is a way to “process and re-express what [I’m] discovering.” Moreover, by trying to think clearly enough about what I learn to turn it into an interesting article or post that other people can also enjoy and learn from, I grasp the material in such a way that I can make connections between different subjects. To borrow a concept from my 2021 piece An Essay on Productivity, Production, and Productive Leisure, thinking clearly and writing clearly about the things you learn and is an example of well-ordered productivity and productive leisure.
Other Benefits of Blogging
Back in 2018, Jeff Starr, a web developer who specializes in WordPress and whose work has informed many of my design choices on The New Leaf Journal as well as one review project, offered his responses to common critiques of blogging he came across in The Pros and Cons of Blogging. In response to the criticism that “[t]here is no practical, real-world benefit to blogging,” Mr. Starr offered a lengthy reply. Below, we will work through some of the points of his reply, piece by piece.
There are many practical benefits to blogging, including staying connected and current with relevant events…
The meaning of “relevant events” will of course vary depending on what the blogger focuses on. For example, a web developer may be inspired to stay on top of trends in one area of development or another even if it is not the focus of his or her current projects. The same may be true for anyone whose blog focuses primarily, or at least substantially, on one area or another. For my own purposes, my experience on this point is closer to Rebecca Blood’s. In order to publish interesting articles, I need to read and take in the world around me. In order to collect interesting links for our sister publications, The Emu Café Social and The Newsletter Leaf Journal, I need to read and think about many articles.
…learning computer and software skills … improving your design skills…
Here, I decided to splice together two separate benefits that Mr. Starr noted, for they should both apply to most blogging cases, albeit potentially in dramatically different ways from one case to another. In my case, I had to learn a good amount about WordPress to take advantage of its strengths and curb its annoyances in furtherance of creating a digital home for my writing. While I am no web designer, I took the time to learn how to modify our theme in order to create a cozy reading aesthetic for our articles. What one may need to learn while blogging will naturally depend on a blog is hosted and run. For example, many people use more ready-made solutions such as Bear Blog, Substack, Blogger, Medium, or WordPress.com, while others put together hand-crafted sites on their own servers. But no matter the set-up, running a blog/writing website is a learning experience. In addition to learning things for one’s own use, running a writing website helps one assess other websites (similarly situated and not) from a more informed perspective.
…promoting yourself or business…
This can mean many things depending on one’s goals and the type of project he or she is running or participating in. In my case, I learned about how different search engines worked and some basic search engine optimization basics, most of which I ignore in favor of simply trying to write interesting articles. But I also learned about different ways of “promoting” a website or finding readers other than the ones covered in the popular how-to articles. For example, while I had at several points used RSS and ATOM feeds for reading before starting The New Leaf Journal, running NLJ made me think about them from the perspective of a writer in addition to having already used them as a reader. From there, I began thinking about the benefits of connecting with readers through feeds over relying on social media. I also learned about interesting new technologies and protocols such as Webmentions, which promote site-to-site conversations (one reason I started our sister site, The Emu Café Social, was to be able to use Webmentions and independent social media more effectively). I also learned about non-algorithmic social media projects which function as “alternatives” to the big tech players, and in thinking about them, I developed some critiques of their approach.
Someone who is running a personal website or blog to promote his or her professional work may focus more on evaluating how his or her project can be used to push sales or as part of a strategy including big social media platforms. Conversely, I know plenty of independent bloggers eschew social media and even major search engines (e.g., Google and Bing) entirely. Every approach brings with it different challenges and potential solutions. But regardless of the approach, running and “promoting” a project, whether to the broader internet or a small online community, brings with it learning opportunities.
…developing your creativity, and improving your writing.
Here again, I will splice two separate and distinct points together. Creativity encompasses a number of points relevant to blogging including site design, coming up with ideas, and expressing ideas in interesting ways. That third aspect segues into writing itself, which covers expressing ideas in an interesting and clear way. That practice makes for improvement, if not perfection, would not be the most interesting point for me to harp on. Instead, I will approach it from a slightly different angle. Clear and effective writing is the end-result of clear thinking. But we need not think of it as a one-way relationship. One must think clearly to write well, and writing well and reflecting on the process helps one think more clearly. Clear thinking benefits more than one’s literary output, but also how effectively one reads and understands the world. Mr. Starr is correct to the extent which he writes that “[t]he benefit of improved writing alone makes blogging a worthwhile endeavor,” and those benefits also accrue in areas not directly related to writing.
A Point of General Applicability
This is the first in a series of articles about the online writing/blogging wisdom I have gleaned from running and writing for The New Leaf Journal, and as such is focused on writing online and similar endeavors. But while putting together this first part of the series, it occurred to me that the benefits of blogging, described above,, may well apply with force to other creative endeavors. While I have demonstrated in the pages of The New Leaf Journal that my ability to convert what I see or picture into visual art is perhaps somewhat less than my ability to string together words into an essay, I see no reason why someone who is interested in painting or sketching could not relate to many of the benefits of blogging that I described above. While I am neither a musician nor songwriter, I noted with interest that Victor V. Gurbo, who has published his own collection of New Leaf Journal articles, described to me how he finds inspiration for his original songs from many places ranging from the great folk tradition to things he overheard on the street. I have no doubt that plying a creative craft has the tendency to change how one relates to the world, help one develop pre-existing interests and cultivate new interests, and serve as a learning tool insofar as that creative output is the result of learning and practice.
Similarly, different forms of creative output can interact positively with one another. To call my own number, while I had in mind the idea of making my own visual novel before launching The New Leaf Journal, much of what I learned while writing about and researching visual novels for my articles informed the choices I made when I finally unleashed a completed visual novel on the public in collaboration with Victor. Editing some of Victor’s music articles for The New Leaf Journal informed some of my thoughts on how we could incorporate his music into a visual novel project. Thinking critically about the visual novels I reviewed and wrote about informed some of my choices of how to structure our visual novel in a short time-frame. Finally, knowledge gleaned from thinking about visual novel systems informed my ultimate decision to use Ren’Py to put together our short visual novel in a way that conformed with a contest we used as a prompt.
One reason I was loath to write this article as an everyone should have a blog or online writing website post is because there are, of course, many other creative and rewarding endeavors. I freely concede I have no talent at all for drawing, and I doubt that I would be much of a match for Victor as a songwriter. Thus, I would most likely gloss over everyone should take up oil painting or everyone should write music and learn an instrument articles were they to appear in my feed reader, just as I am sure some people who are deeply invested in those or other artistic endeavors would, or do, read over similarly structured posts promoting universal blogging or online writing. However, I will submit, notwithstanding the foregoing, that many people engaged in other creative areas or who are pursuing one interest or another may benefit from having a personal website or blog where they can share their thoughts in a way that people can read and follow without needing to sign up for one algorithmic platform or service or another.
Aesthetic Conclusion
The foregoing potential benefits of blogging and publishing online are non-exhaustive, and I am sure I could make this article quite a bit longer were I to endeavor to do so. However, this is the first of a six-part series on my blogging “wisdom” (or something to that effect), and some ideas are best saved for future entries in the series. I will conclude with one aesthetic benefit.
Back in 2021, I published Artisinal Small Websites for a Humane Web, wherein I quoted from David Perrell’s The Microwave Economy: “We’ve overwhelmingly used our wealth to make the world cheaper instead of more beautiful, more functional instead of more meaningful.” Jumping from his central point to my own, much of the contemporary internet is inhumane (with “humane” here referring to being by and for human beings). Text and media are created for bots and algorithms, to be “consumed” by passive phone owners. In contrast, blogging and writing online are ideally humane endeavors. One person shares interesting things online, for the amusement and/or elucidation of human readers. There are many essays about people recommending one gimmick or another to ameliorate phone or social media addiction, but fewer essays about choosing the good content and simply ignoring the bad, a deficiency I identified and sought to remedy with my An Essay on Productivity, Production, and Productive Leisure. Running a virtuously humane blog or writing website is one example of using the internet well. One may use a feed collection in the way I described in Feeds and Read-It-Later for Online Reading to read good writing for interested human readers online and then contribute to the corpus of good online writing on his or her own digital home. In so doing, the blogger is distinctly human online, using the internet to share his or her thoughts about the world and subjects of interest while gleaning inspiration from similarly humane online endeavors. From an individual perspective, the internet can be what one makes of it, and approaching it from the perspective of the good blogger is a one of many fine ways to make the best of it.
