Over the years I’ve shared my writing through Mailchimp (a former employer), Substack (regrettably), Buttondown, and Medium (my current employer). I’ve written guest posts for corporate blogs (Adobe, Shopify), employer blogs (Mailchimp again, Vox Media), and here on my own blog. I’ve posted on Twitter, Mastodon, and now Bluesky. I even achieved a professional milestone by publishing (about user research, natch) on The Verge!
While I’ve been fortunate to have my words appear in many places, the unfortunate truth is that posterity is promised to no one. Corporate blog posts tend to disappear with website redesigns or organizational restructures. Newsletter archives can disappear with a migration to a new platform. Platforms can outright disappear or become a Nazi bar from which you need to make a hasty retreat.
This is why I always recommend optimizing for redundancy. Share your work wherever your audience will find it, but make sure you also publish to one or more personal repositories. For me this means
- I draft my posts in Markdown in Apple Notes on my laptop or phone, which backs up to iCloud
- I copy and paste completed posts to my Github repo
- Which I then push to Netlify, where my Jekyll blog runs
- New step: Now I copy and paste the post to Medium (use the products you work on, people!)
- And every so often I pull down a copy of my repo to back it up locally and to Google Drive
I write to help myself think. Losing old content is like losing a part of my memory. My backup process might sound like (and likely is!) overkill, but having seen my writing disappear from the internet through no fault of my own, and having struggled to find archived versions of my writing on the Internet Archive, it’s worth it to me. And it might be worth it to you, too.
