16 Years of Blogging: What Actually Changed (And What I Miss)
I started this blog in 2010 with a nine-month-old and a brand new Canon Rebel. The whole point was accountability. I wanted a reason to actually take the photos I kept talking about taking, and a place to keep writing before that habit quietly died the way habits do when a baby takes over your life.
Blogging in 2010 looked almost nothing like it does now. There was no algorithm deciding who saw your posts, people found you through RSS readers, blogrolls, and other bloggers linking to you because they genuinely liked what you wrote, not because a platform served it up. Comments were where the real conversation happened, not a scroll of strangers arguing in a feed. It was slower, smaller, and in a lot of ways, more honest, since there was no incentive structure yet telling you what to write to get seen.
I don’t share photos of my kids anymore. Not one clean decision, just years of pulling back a little at a time as they got older and I got more aware of how permanent the internet actually is. The blog that started as a place to share them barely mentions them now.
The Business Side Changed More Than I Expected
Sponsored posts used to be the whole deal, straightforward: a brand wants a post, you write it, done. That’s basically what TikTok and Instagram brand deals are now. On the blog side, that’s mostly gone.
What replaced it is a much more specific kind of scrutiny. Brands and the agencies working with them now look past a site’s raw numbers toward whether it has actually earned trust, through real content quality, editorial standards, and genuine readership, rather than an inflated authority score with no real audience behind it, as Outreach Monks explains in their 2026 guide to authority backlinks. A placement on a site with an impressive-looking score but almost no real readers or social following delivers close to nothing, which is exactly the kind of low-effort deal that used to work and simply doesn’t anymore. Editorial links from high-traffic, respected sites carry real value because of genuine readership and editorial context, not an inflated authority score alone.
I’ve watched that shift happen in real time, from the inside, one email at a time.
The Post I Never Saw Coming
My first post to actually go viral wasn’t sponsored, wasn’t planned, wasn’t strategic in any way. It was about adopting our rescue dog, Athena. I wrote it the same way I wrote everything back then, because I wanted to, and it took off.
I never imagined that would eventually lead to writing for brands regularly. I really never imagined I’d almost stop writing the other kind entirely, the kind that made Athena’s post work in the first place.
I hope I get back to it. Right now, if I’m honest, most of what runs here exists to make money and keep the traffic steady. That’s not a complaint. It’s just not where I thought sixteen years would land me. What I actually miss is writing something because it happened, not because it needs to convert.
Why I’d Still Tell Someone to Start One Today
If someone asked me whether it’s worth starting a blog in 2026, I’d tell them yes, for one reason that matters more than any platform trend or algorithm change: it’s the only thing you actually own.
Meta can end your reach in a single afternoon. TikTok can lose its footing overnight, through a policy shift, a ban, an ownership change, none of it in your control. A blog doesn’t disappear because a platform decides it doesn’t like you anymore.
If I were actually advising someone starting today, I’d tell them three things. Write consistently before you write strategically, the algorithm-chasing can come later, but the habit has to exist first. Don’t wait until you have a “niche” figured out, mine found me, I didn’t find it. And expect the business side to look nothing like you picture it now, mine didn’t, twice over.
Sixteen years in, that’s still the whole argument.
