This is the fourth part of six of my blogging “wisdom” project, which I am undertaking as part of The New Leaf Journal’s sixth birthday. Today is May 17, 2026. Back on May 16, 2020, I published what I recently described as my personal favorite NLJ article, Welcome to The Emu Café. The article begins:
Welcome, one and all, to the opening of The Emu Café. In this special establishment of The New Leaf Journal, we serve only the finest descriptions of coffee, tea, and snacks to accompany. After you brew and procure your own, enjoy the lively discourse about aesthetics and the life lived well. The ambiance is always peaceful. Light flits through the windows such that, while indoors, the particular sensibilities of the days and seasons permeate the establishment. The traits of the seasons are most crisp in the refreshing mornings. Hours pass by slowly, like a reverie, in the bold colors of the afternoon. Lovers of elegance and wisdom are all in accord that the Moon, embroidered in the starlight curtains, as seen through The Emu Café’s window, is indeed beautiful.
NLJ was not yet one month old when I published Welcome to The Emu Café, the name of which is inspired by an anecdote I shared in the article. The article stands on its own, but also served, and still serves, as something of a statement of purpose for The New Leaf Journal. I presented NLJ as a cozy place to enjoy interesting (or so I hope) articles on a variety of topics. But for our present purposes, let us focus on a different aspect of my Emu Café introduction. Implicit in the introduction is my invitation to readers to take some time out of their day to peruse the writing, photography, and design on offer in our humble online writing establishment.
My first three blogging wisdom posts focused foremost on the perspective of the blogger. I began by offering my thoughts on the benefits of blogging and writing online. Next, I offered my opinion on whether bloggers and internet writers should focus on one area or many. Finally, I tackled blogging routines and schedules and the prospect of burnout. Welcome to The Emu Café inspired me to make part four about considering site visitors. Let is consider the matter of blog hospitality from the comfort of The Emu Café.
Cesar Aguirre recently wrote that “[t[elling readers you don’t want to waste their time is already wasting it.” I agreed with his assessment in a post on our short-form writing sister site, The Emu Café Social. In so doing, I quoted from my more recent article, Staying the Course in Writing in the LLM Moment: “The way to convince people that human writing is worth reading is to write well and in one’s own voice…” Taking these disparate ideas together, we can articulate a sort of guiding principle for bloggers and writers who publish online.
From the outset, we should grant that different webmasters, internet writers, and bloggers place differing levels of emphasis on seeking readers for their work. Finding readers may be of critical importance to someone who is monetizing his or her writing, either directly or indirectly. Others, like me, make an effort to make their work discoverable but otherwise let the chips fall where they may. Still others eschew analytics (and sometimes search engine indexing) and make a point of not knowing how many people visit their sites and read their blogs. But regardless of one’s approach to this point, we can proceed with the assumption that if someone publishes his or her writing or media on the open internet, someone else may stumble upon it. I will also assume arguendo that someone who publishes his or her writing or media on the open internet is, at a minimum, not opposed to someone else reading or viewing it.
Granting the foregoing, bloggers and writers who publish their work for public perusal should work to ensure that what they publish is worth time the time it would take for someone whose interest is piqued to stop and read or view it. This has been my North Star of sorts since turning over a new leaf by publishing The New Leaf Journal. As I noted in Blogging and the Niche Question, my writing defies easy containerization since I write about many, often wholly unrelated, topics. To be sure, it is unlikely that any single reader, potential or actual, will be interested in every topic I write about. But, while granting that, I do not spend the same amount of time on each and every article that I would spend producing a book or game for publication, I make a point of doing my utmost to ensure that what I publish will be worth the time someone chooses to spend reading, viewing, and considering it. While I articulate my blogging philosophy on our site’s About Page and occasionally when writing about our site more broadly, I refrain from trying to reassure someone who picks up one of my articles or short posts that it will be worth his or her time. Instead, I try to convey whatever it is I am trying to convey, whether it is an essay about blogging such as this or a short post centered on my photograph of something in Brooklyn, with clarity and sometimes good humor. One need not protest too much when trying to write things that are worth reading – demonstrating by example is enough.
Having opined that it is unlikely any single person is interested in every topic I cover or would otherwise be interested in every article I publish, I state the obvious in noting that I cannot offer some sort of universal rule for what constitutes being worth someone’s time. Time is finite, and we all have different interests and preferences. Speaking for me, I follow writers on the internet who cover different topics with sometimes dramatically different writing styles. But I can turn to John Ruskin’s Sesame essay for a benchmark which guides my own writing and may be instructive to others. In so doing, I quote from my discussion in an article I published about three weeks after Welcome to The Emu Café (another personal, albeit unsung, favorite), On When to Watch Credits or Leave a Bad Movie:
Speaking about books in mid-nineteenth century England, John Ruskin stated that “all books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.” Focusing on good books, the authors of the books of all time are “written with the view of … permanence,” while the good book of the hour is “simply the useful or pleasant talk of some person whom you cannot otherwise converse with, printed for you.”
I dare say that most blog posts and internet articles have firmer aspirations on the “good book of the hour” classification than on challenging the great books, but we can set aside Ruskin’s literary categories for our present purpose and extract from what he wrote some things that internet writers and bloggers should target. Many good blog posts can be described as “the useful or pleasant talk of some person whom you cannot otherwise converse with, printed for you.” More broadly, “pleasant” and/or “useful” are good qualities to consider when publishing to the internet. Of course, some grander articles may have designs on permanence, an idea I allude to with my choice of the word perennially in our site slogan. But in most cases, it suffices to try to write articles and blog posts that are pleasant and useful for someone who may be interested in the topic or enjoy the perspective of the author, and who would not be able to enjoy and/or engage with the post were the author to have not published it on the internet.
Related to the idea of an article, blog post, or other internet media being worth a reader’s or viewer’s time is whether it respects the time someone decides to spend with it. I begin with two quotes to use as discussion starters. First, I quote from Scott Nesbitt’s A Contrarian’s Guide to Blogging:
What you should be aiming for is a core of enthusiastic, engaged readers. I’d rather have 100 engaged readers than 1,000 casual ones. People who keep coming back because what I’ve written is helpful, is interesting, and speaks to them.
Having granted that not all webmasters, internet writers, or bloggers go into their project thinking about readers in terms of numbers at all, I will stop short of telling people what they should be aiming for in the interest of making this post as broadly useful as possible. But Mr. Nesbitt’s core idea — that writers and bloggers should publish with the idea of producing writing and media that is helpful, interesting, and pleasant or useful to people out there on the internet is on all fours with the recommendations in this article. Before addressing the “100 engaged readers” vs “1,000 casual ones” point specifically, let us step away from the blogosphere to quote Daisuke Take, a Japanese commercial video game developer:
However, in a world overflowing with games, getting a slice of that pie of gamers is a difficult task. So, I figure there are about six people in the world who love everything I make, and I’ll do my best to cater my games specifically to them.
I appreciate Mr. Take’s perspective here because he advanced this point, which is instructive to non-commercial personal bloggers, from the vantage of someone who creates video games as his livelihood. I have little doubt that many of the people who take the time to read small websites like The New Leaf Journal are less than satisfied with the state of affairs on the internet today. As Carter Baxter wrote in The Artisanal Web, today’s web, or at least the part your average internet denizen is wont to see, “is built for machines.” He writes:
Most of what happens online now is measured, optimized, and fed back into systems that decide what gets seen and what doesn’t. You and I mostly exist as inputs: things to be tracked, monetized, and fed into the gears.
Over the years, I have made a point of distinguishing between humane writing and media on the internet. In Humane Content in World of Language Models I juxtaposed writing and media that is “by humans, for humans,” with “content” that is created for algorithms, bots, whether made by a human being or by a bot, for the purpose of being seen and “engaged” with by consumers, or, as Mr. Baxter put it, “inputs.” I have warned against “erroneously associat[ing] engagement and virality with good writing.”
I trust that it goes without saying, notwithstanding that I am saying it anyway, that this article is concerned with humane writing by human beings for other human beings, or as Joshua Blais put it in Using the internet like it’s 1999, work that “strive[s] to glorify the Creator with creation…” In this spirit, we can appreciate the sentiments of Messrs. Nesbitt and Take as a call for applying human intellect and creativity to the creation of interesting things for an interested audience. One is more likely to create something of lasting value as you simultaneously discover some of the personal benefits of blogging through this process than you would if you were to focus on chasing distinctly algorithmic and social media concepts such as virality by generating “content” for bots and machines to convey to passive consumers who may idly drift from one thing to the next. Moreover, in writing for an audience of people who find the topics one tends to cover or the manner in which one tends to approach things interesting and worthwhile, one is more likely to approach his or her creation and publishing endeavors with a sense of respect and gratitude for the people who look forward to your work.
Having just contrasted my project from the bad things on the internet, I would be loath to fail to remind readers of my view that a blog or writing website should be defined by what it is for i rather than what it is against. I quote from my February 2026 essay The Positive Case for Good Tech:
Regular readers will know that I have a generally negative view of what I would describe as inhumane content on the web, referring to those monstrosities that are created first and foremost for bots and algorithms (regardless of whether they are created by human beings or bots). I suppose I could promote The New Leaf Journal by insisting that it is better than those bad things like AI slop, internet listicles, or your average social media feed. But … [w]hy would I define my project in terms of its enemies (used colloquially in this case). Perhaps someone who is desperately trying to break his or her social media dependency would appreciate such a definition, but it would likely fall flat with someone who is simply looking for good things to read online. The best case for The New Leaf Journal or any similar project on the web are the good things about it. If someone agrees with those good things, he or she can decide for him or herself whether spending time going through The New Leaf Journal archives is more fulfilling than spending that time on big tech social media.
I do not doubt that many people turn to reading and writing blogs at least in part because of their negative views of the big social media platforms and AI and SEO slop. I fully approve of turning to independent publishing for creating and perusing humane writing online (small web or otherwise) as an alternative to the bad things online, as I discussed earlier in Social webs of personal websites. But a writing website that is obsessed or smitten with what it opposes or disdains is unlikely to be as worthwhile as a site that focuses more on establishing what it is for. Stepping away from blogs for a moment, I quote from my Designing video games to produce benefits, wherein I argued against designing video games with the primary purpose of addressing psychological issues or boosting emotional health:
The primary purpose of a game best conceived should be to be a good game, designed in both form and function to be engrossing in a positive way from the end-player’s perspective. Games need not all aspire to the same heights. There are many more games of the hour to play than games for all time – and there is nothing wrong with that. So long as the designer first contemplates how to make a meaningfully engrossing game for the player, he or she is off to a good start. Lofty ideals attached to a dull game are structures built on a foundation of sand. But lofty ideas attached to an engaging game can reach the player.
My assessment of games, which I stand by here — is not on all fours with the writing websites and blogs generally (a writing website or blog can address more squarely issues such as mental or emotional health without needing to concern itself with engaging with game design), but I think it is more or less on all fours with the issue at hand. A writing website or blog can serve as an effective alternative to the bad things on the internet if it fulfills the essential function of being a good writing website or blog witthat has a positive vision for itself publishes ematerial which is, at a minimum, useful or pleasant for interested readers. In the context of avoiding frivolous “distractions” in one’s leisure time, I wrote in An Essay on Productivity, Production, and Productive Leisure:
The solution to avoiding distractions in leisure time is neither negative nor some sort of productivity refinement ratchet. The solution must ultimately be positive. There must be a clear good that comes from avoiding distractions and frivolity, something intrinsically valuable. That is what allows one to banish distractions and fill his or her leisure time with good things.
Even when tackling the bad things on the internet in writing (which I do with some regularity), one should maintain a positive understanding of his or her own project and hold him or herself to the standard of publishing things that are worth and respectful of the time it takes interested readers to read and consider. The best way to hew closely to this high standard is to ensure that one is working to produce writing and/or media that would meet the standard without being weighed down by the specter of malevolent internet forces competing for the attention of his or her actual and potential readers.
This article, like the earlier articles in this series, has included links with references to relevant articles and blog posts from around the web. Linking and giving credit are important parts of publishing for ethical and pragmatic reasons, but for the purpose of this article, I will focus on discretionary linking as a way to make an article, blog post, or website more useful to people who take the time to stop by and read. In a post titled The Good Old Hyperlink, Kyle Labriola wrote “I like hyperlinks because it lets my personal writing feel like an evolving conversation.” Taking the point one step further, Matthias Ott wrote that the link is “the Web’s most fundamental building block, the thing that connects one human’s work to another’s.” We can expand on these quotes, which focus on the benefits of linking to the blogger or writer, to consider the benefits that are passed down to readers. In Feeds and Read-It-Later for Online Reading, I made the case that a collection of syndication feeds can lead to discovering pleasant and useful articles outside the feed collection:
The best use for read-it-later tools for someone who relies primarily on feed subscriptions for reading is to perform the function that algorithms purport to perform for the majority. If you subscribe to interesting long-form articles, many of the articles that you read will have links. These links will either be to other pages on the article’s website or to articles from around the web discussed or cited to in the article. For example, if you are one of our feed-based subscribers, you will note that this article has many internal links. These internal links are the key using a curated feed collection as the foundation for reading content from the broader internet.
We need not focus on one specific implementation of the idea here such as assuming a given site visitor or guest uses a feed reader or read-it-later tool. The essential point from the perspective of a writer is that by including links and references to interesting articles, blog posts, or materials from around the web, the writer provides something of value to readers. I have “discovered” many websites and interesting articles and resources, including some that I have referenced in this blogging “wisdom” project, by following links inside articles. Readers should note that my linking point is not limited to the small web or indie websites. I like to think that my reviews of obscure visual novels, discussions of apps and services I use, references to non-blog materials such as books and magazines on Project Gutenberg, or papers from around the web may be pleasant or useful to people who take the time to read those articles. Moreover, as I opined in On Internal and External Linking internal links to one’s own prior writing may be similarly useful, so long as the writer or blogger considers whether a given internal link enriches a particular article or blog post, continues a conversation with him or herself, or would otherwise be pleasant or useful from the perspective of someone following the link from a given article.
Let us wrap things up with a brief section on site design and features. I have largely avoided this topic in my blogging wisdom series because all of my meaningful site design experience (such as it is) has been with WordPress (self-hosted), and my interest in this blogging “wisdom” project rests more in the process and publishing of writing than in web design. Moreover, I plan to address site design in the ten days (from the date of publication of this article) in the final post of the series. But an article about how to properly welcome guests to a blog or writing website would feel incomplete without some notes of general applicability about website “features,” “anti-features,” and the like, and far be it from me to publish an admittedly non-exhaustive survey with the nagging feeling that it is incomplete. Before continuing, note that I am assuming arguendo that this discussion is about blogs and websites containing human-written and created articles, posts, and materials, for an audience of human beings.
As Dave Rupert discussed in Don’t let your voice be flattened by the über theme, some systems for hosting blogs and writing websites are less flexible than others. But having granted this, let us think about some principles that may be broadly applicable whether one is using self-hosted WordPress, a static site generator, or a button-downed platform such as Substack. In Consume Labudubai, Matthew Morgan admonished readers: “Don’t consume fads.” This is a good starting point for almost everything in life, including when deciding how to design a website. A humorous and incisive post on Adële’s blog titled All my clients wanted a carousel, now it’s an AI chatbot! highlights the dangers of chasing fads in web design. It is true that many sites have carousels and pop-up chatbot chat boxes, but it is just as true that these are the sorts of things that annoy most visitors who do not employ effective content blockers. Other websites can be great resources for inspiring one’s own site design choices, but only insofar as one considers whether the implementation of one idea or another would make visiting your own website a better experience for visitors. The utility of this idea concerns more than whether one addition or another to a website would be a feature or anti-feature. For example, see my articles Thoughts on WordPress Categories and Tags and Implementing Boolean Search On NLJ for how I thought through how I could organize my articles and posts and make them more easily searchable for the benefit of people who are interested in what I publish.
Concerning matters within one’s control in running a website, I recommend considering whether a given site design choice is respectful of people who are interested in taking the time to read an article or view media on the site in question and what, if anything, can be done to mitigate \ potential downsidesr.
For example, analytics and other forms of tracking are not strictly necessary for most non-business and non-commercial projects. As I noted at the top, some writers and bloggers eschew analytics all together. See, for example, the compelling perspective advanced by Matthew Morgan in No Analytics, No Pressure. Long-time readers will know that I use a WordPress plugin called Koko Analytics on The New Leaf Leaf Journal for the purpose of tracking page hits. I find value in having some idea of how many people find my articles and which articles receive visits and attention. While I write about what I am interested in writing about, my Koko Analytics stats offer clues on what may be of interest to people on the internet, and by extension which topics I may be interested in writing about that could lead to more people discovering some of my less popular writing interests. I have also folded my stats into The New Leaf Journal and The Newsletter Leaf Journal, paying them forward to people who enjoy reading my work by highlighting our most-visited articles and posts of the week, month, and year. Koko Analytics, which runs entirely locally, comes with limitations, as I discussed in my 2022 and 2025 reviews of the plugin, but I settled on it because its limitations are consistent with my goal of having access to some information about visits to my site while respecting site visitors. (Note: I used a similar WordPress plugin called Statify for part of 2025, but all of the points about Koko Analytics are applicable to Statify as well.) While there is no one-size-fits-all solution to analytics, I suggest two general rules of thumb. Firstly, before implementing any analytics solution, the webmaster, blogger, or writer should consider whether he or she or the site more broadly would benefit from having the information. Secondly, assuming that the webmaster, blogger, or writer concludes, like I did for my projects, that having some analytics offers benefits to his or her site and readers I recommend first implementing the most minimal viable solution, or alternatively looking into how to mitigate the potentially deleterious effects on guests and visitors of the heavier solutions.
Beyond analytics, one should contemplate whether his or her site design respects visitors. This can mean different things in different contexts. For example, in the case of a WordPress website, many factors can affect site performance and bandwidth. I made deliberate choices to make The New Leaf Journal lightweight while still presenting my writing and images in a way that I find to be at least somewhat attractive. By making NLJ lightweight, I hope to ensure that it loads quickly (even on limited devices) and that it is respectful of visitors’ bandwidth. While site performance and design depend on many factors such as hosting and the kinds of materials that appear on a site, I encourage my fellow webmasters to imagine that there could be an interested potential reader in Antarctica with very slow internet. I would, insofar as possible, encourage webmasters to limit, if not exclude entirely, third-party resources from their website.
Finally, in a non-performance area, I recommend that webmasters, bloggers, and writers consider their design choices from the perspective of a guest of the site and work to ensure that these design choices respect the agency, intelligence, and time of visitors. In short, put the writing or other creative works front and center and trust the work to make the case that the website in question is worth perusing.
In January 1996, Bill Gates wrote an essay titled Content is King. The title of the essay may of course be more well-known than its contents (or Mr. Gates’ authorship thereof). Having noted my caveats about the use of the term “content” in contemporary internet discourse, we can extract a humane website idea from the phrase to bring this essay to a close. Part of respecting potential and actual website visitors is writing articles and blog posts for interested human readers and ensuring that the website home of those articles is similarly designed for human beings. Trust that some readers out there will appreciate and like what they read and that some may become frequent guests of the online establishment, provided that it stays true to the methods and principles that give ruse to pleasant and useful articles and media. So long as the content, so to speak, is good and worthwhile to someone, it can be trusted to speak for itself without being buried in advertising pitches and marketing speak or chasing trends.
Six years after first welcoming readers to The Emu Café, I am happy to report that the establishment remains open for one and all to “stop by from time to time.”
