A post from John Gruber came across my RSS feed today about an online publisher shutting down because of Facebook’s new algorithm. Gruber links to an article from Business Insider that details the shuttering of LittleThings, a digital publisher that relied on Facebook for viewership and revenue. Both Gruber’s take and the article are worth the read, but this quote lit a spark:

18 months later exactly the thing Speiser said he wasn’t concerned about — Facebook fucking him over — forced him to shut down his company. The only platform publishers can count on is the open web.

The only platform publishers can count on is the open web. And by publishers, I’ll take that as anyone publishing anything on the web. Large media companies, businesses, bloggers, mom and pop shops – all the way down to your friends and family. If you’re writing first on Facebook, Medium, Twitter, or any other third-party platform you can’t rely on that content being there in the future. You can’t rely on current revenue and you can’t count it as an archive.

You can only rely on the open web, your own domain, a platform you control, and your own backups. Period. That doesn’t mean you can’t publish elsewhere, on Facebook or Medium. But publish on your own site first, then cross-post elsewhere.

A month of blogging

Starting in March (tomorrow) I’ll be trying to write at least one post per day. I mean for these posts to be relevant to the current site visitors on spigotdesign.com. Most of the traffic we get is to blog posts I’ve written about design, web development, WordPress, software and a few other categories. I also will be (hopefully) writing posts that are relevant to the type of visitors I’d like to get more of. That is people and businesses that want to buy my shit.

Here’s what I’m hoping to accomplish:

• Improve my writing. The more I write, the better I’ll get. The better I get the better the content.
• Increase site traffic.  Page views have been in a slow, steady decline over the last few years.  I partially attribute that to the decline in new posts.
• Gain more clients. We’re currently open to taking on new clients. Chat with us now about getting started.
• Most of all, have fun and promote the indie web.

I’ll be tagging these all with blogmonth if you’d like to keep up with it or add it to your feed. Leave a comment below if there’s anything you’d like me to write about!