Post Formats, Bring Back the Fun and Flexibility in Blogging

Bob Dunn: Hey, Bob here, and I’m back with my host that I’ve missed a little bit. He was taking a break. And Derek, how are you doing?

Derek Hanson: It is great to be back from sabbatical. One of the most beautiful perks about working for Automattic is the 3-month sabbaticals after your 5-year anniversary. And yeah, really excited to jump back in with Open Channels.

Bob Dunn: Yeah, yeah, I was thinking about you all that time, all during those 3 months, thinking, hmm, that must be nice.

Derek Hanson: It was nice, but somehow busier than I ever could have imagined. But it was a great breakaway from the screen, but lots of time reflecting and thinking about, I thought a lot about writing, which I know is something we’re going to talk about today. But I was glad to have that space to do things I have a lot of passion for, which is woodworking and house remodeling and just tons of time with my family and all those things swirling around, just thinking about how do I document this? How do I, you know, track this stuff and push it out? And writing is the thing that kept coming back to me. So, yeah.

Bob Dunn: Yeah, I was gonna, I’m gonna have on somebody else, gonna be talking about how sometimes we don’t ever have the time to just sit and think about something. I mean, you’re always so rushed, you know, so much stuff is going through your head that to actually sit and not be distracted by anything and your thoughts just kind of wander. And I’ve found that I’ve done that more and more. Sometimes I’ll just take a break and just, yeah, just not focus on anything, kind of let my thoughts just take over and go whatever direction. And I think that’s something that once people realize that, hey, this is kind of cool, this is, you know, this is something I’ve missed, actually.

Derek Hanson: Oh, absolutely. 100%. Yeah. You, I couldn’t really said that better myself, especially, but there were, I know this isn’t really what we’re gonna talk about today, but one of the things I thought about leading into my sabbatical was, hey, I’m gonna like spend so much time experimenting with AI and building some like side projects that I had these ideas for. And I didn’t do any of that. I spent so little time on, on my screen and it was really, really uplifting from a mental health perspective and just, yeah, to kind of sort of reground yourself and, and have more of those just still moments. I think it made a big difference.

Bob Dunn: Yeah, for sure. Well, here we are back on the screen and the mic and all that good stuff. And so we’re going to talk about blogging, but it’s also about the kind of the root of it as far as post formats. And I kind of dive right into that. Now, I’m not, you are probably better equipped than me to actually put a definition to post format. And then we’ll kind of get into talking about how we’re both using them right now or thinking about them.

Derek Hanson: Yeah, well, I do all my blogging and writing in WordPress, and if you followed the trajectory, I guess, in the history of WordPress over the years, classic WordPress had these things called post formats, and it was a way for you to organize your content around sort of the mode of communication. So typically people think about blogging and they think about writing and long form content, it’s like, oh, is that a 500, 1,000, 2,000 word essay? Okay, it could be certainly, but that’s like your standard post.

Post formats allow you the opportunity to do, I have just a status update, which is much more like your social media post. Like if you were to post on Facebook or Twitter, X, you know, Instagram, whatever, that’s like just very quick. Here’s some content. That’s a status. Then there’s other ones like quotes and links where it’s just like, hey, this is just literally a link I found on the internet, but I want to post it to my blog so I can follow it, track it, search it, have a history for it. Photos, galleries. So all of these are ways to give a different method of publishing content on your blog.

And a lot of times, people were using this and still are to this day to create sort of digital gardens is one way to talk about them. It’s not everything has to be polished and ready for a magazine or print publication or going out to audiences of critics. It’s just, hey, here’s this thing I thought about today. Quick status, post, it’s done. So that, in a nutshell, those are the post formats. They’re different types of content that you can have on one blog, which I think is really, really fun and interesting to think about.

Bob Dunn: It’s interesting when talking about it that way, because I had just recently, I think I’d written something or on my personal blog, I started back up, but something to the effect of that. I think people now feel like they have to have engagement, they have to have views. It’s become so obsessive with nothing is worth your time anymore unless other people are seeing it. And a lot of people are seeing it, or a good amount of people. And…

Derek Hanson: More than 2 or 3, right?

Bob Dunn: Yeah, really. For me, it’s like, okay, so when I started my blog back up, my personal blog, which I don’t know how many times I’ve done. I’ve been kind of strange with blogs because again, I’m doing my blog on WordPress and I’ve done it since whenever, a long time ago, is I never carried on one blog. I decided always that I did a blog, I kind of had some reason for doing it. And then when that lived its life, it was time to close that blog down and move to something else. I think a lot of it was to do with the business and writing about tech and stuff that I felt just became outdated. And I thought, well, it’s time to kind of go a different direction.

This time when I was doing it, and I’ve tried this before, I thought, I just want to start something. I don’t really care if anybody even sees it in the sense of I’m not writing or going to do it for that reason. If somebody decides to tag along, I know that the arguments can be that, oh yeah, well, why post, do it like a social type of post on your blog. You know, you do it on X, you do it wherever you do it, and you do it for a reason because you want everybody to see it and you want to build that community and blah, blah, blah. Where I’m at the point where it’s like, no, you know, that just doesn’t matter for what I’m doing there. And it even becomes something more than like a personal journal. It becomes just a space. I’ve been doing it now for, I don’t know, not that long. Maybe this is second or third week. I can’t remember. And I’ll be actually on, and people will think, oh, you’re insane, Bob. I’m on X and I’ll think of something and I think, oh, I’m going to go put that on my blog. And I’ve never thought of it that way of just spur of the moment.

And so I’ve started to, well, I basically started it with post types. Somebody recommended a plugin. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it, but Courtney Robertson, who, for those that don’t know, she’s been in the WordPress space and the open source space for a long time. And she’s done quite a few amazing things in it. And she did this plugin for WordPress. But somebody said, hey, you got to try it if you’re going to do post formats. So I did it. And that’s what I’m using right now.

Derek Hanson: Yeah, it’s Post Formats for Block Themes. And that’s sort of the second half of the trajectory of WordPress that I was alluding to earlier. So there’s classic WordPress where you had these classic PHP templated themes. And now block themes are a way to modernize WordPress for people to edit any part of their site. But one thing it had lost during that transition were post formats. It became much more of a website builder as opposed to a writing and publishing platform. It still did all of those things, but it wasn’t the primary direction.

And post formats, at least from a theming perspective, because a theme helps display your formats in unique ways, right? If I have a gallery post of a bunch of photos, I want that to look different than my blog post. If I have a quote post, I want that to look different than my status update post, right? So all these things you want to have sort of control over. And Courtney’s plugin was a thing that actually was part of what inspired me to dig into this a little bit more as I built my own theme and have been bringing post formats back for myself. It’s really helped that because you learned, hey, now I can maintain classic post formats, but in modern block theming with WordPress. And yeah, it’s a fantastic plugin and it’s a nice transition to bring it back into your daily writing habits or weekly, however often you write.

Bob Dunn: I wonder what will ever bring people back to wanting to do something on their blog like this. This is quite a bit different than, you know, maybe you decided to have a blog because, well, we have a blog on this site though, Open Channels FM, that has specific content related to the podcast we put out. In fact, it’s usually based on the podcast we put out. So I wonder, you know, with, oh, it’s just such an insane world now. That’s all I can say. It’s like, how do you, you know, with people and the way they are adamant about social media and being on social media. And it’s not to say, you know, has to be one or the other, you know, can be both. But some people are going to start or decide to do something different. They’re going to say, I remember the days that, you know, I just had a podcast where we were talking about making the internet weird again. And that kind of falls along that same track because it’s, you know, it’s not weird again. It’s in a sense, it means going back to what it used to be in some ways, which we can never go back. I mean, you know, totally, but we can bring some stuff back. What’s kind of, what’s your thoughts around all that?

Derek Hanson: I think you touched on it just a little bit earlier that I think is the number one sort of mental roadblock to get over, and that’s audience. And this is something I’m actually reflecting on and I’m gonna post about here pretty soon. So I come from a very classic rhetorical background through grad school with writing and rhetoric and communication. And, you know, there’s the audience or the rhetorical triangle of context, audience, and purpose, right? An audience is typically, I think, from a blogging perspective and just a publishing perspective is where people really get hung up the most because, oh, I need to have people reading my stuff. It’s, I don’t know if it’s because you want the validation or maybe there’s a, you know, a potential boost in some like business you’re trying to run. I think an unfortunate moment of blogging history is that there was a period of, hey, start this multimillion dollar affiliate blog, right? Like you can make money blogging and work from home. And I think those days, I’m sure you could still be successful doing something like that, but the purpose of why you blog, I think, is what you need to think about a little bit more instead of the audience. And I think the audience should just now be yourself, right?

Like, I’m actually, even though I’m publishing sort of like more essay long-form content that does have a specific purpose to reach people that might have value in what I’m saying. And it’s traditionally about like, here’s like these new AI tools, here’s stuff you can do in agency work, you know, with web design. Here’s, you know, just thoughts about, you know, what should be on, on a blog and what you should do. Like, of course I’m writing for somebody in hopes that they’ll read it, but honestly it’s more, it’s becoming more personal. Like I’m gonna write it regardless and I don’t need to worry about if somebody reads it or not because that’s not the value that I’m getting out of it. If other people get value out of it, great. And I would love to build community and have conversations. But like you were saying, well, I saw something on X, but then I posted it on my blog. I think that’s the mindset I’m hoping people get back to.

Well, what if X goes down? What if Instagram goes down? What if Facebook goes down? Any, I mean, this is a long conversation in any open source community of walled gardens, right? Like if there’s a proprietary platform where you’re putting all of your content, what happens if that platform ever just snatches your content away essentially, right? You don’t know when that’s going to happen. So if you have a, you know, whether it’s a journaling app on your phone or your laptop, or if you’re using an open source tool like WordPress, you know, it doesn’t matter as long as you were thinking sort of like your own stuff first. Like if I publish something that I wrote, I want it to start with me before it goes out to any other platform because you start to lose those things, especially with the amount of social media platforms. There’s so many of them, right? Well, if I have sort of this, if I had the center of the flywheel, which is my blog, and that’s where all of my content goes first, even if it’s a link or a video or a short-form post, like it should be there because, well, I wrote it, I want control over it, and I want to be able to go back to it if I ever want to. As opposed to, there’s things I’ve posted on LinkedIn or, you know, wherever, but wait, how easy is it for me to get back to that and have a history of it? It’s not connected to the space that I own.

Bob Dunn: Right, exactly. And I, I often think, you know, there’s been this, I don’t know, for a while some people keep talking about the walled garden and saying, well, you know, most people don’t really care about their own real estate or having that spot that there is that they can call their own. But I think that also the direction that things are going on different platforms and stuff, I’m wondering if people are starting to slightly rethink that. Even if you haven’t experienced it before, start thinking, you know, I’m on this platform. Maybe for some reason you’re tired of who owns it, maybe the content, maybe you’re just the people, whatever. I think there might be a point where some people might start drawing a line if they know that is available to them. They’ll start thinking, maybe if I just want to communicate, I want to get back to the art of writing, it doesn’t have to be to determine how many people are going to click the like button or something like that.

I mean, for me, one of the challenges, and I think this is what’s interesting about post formats, is that as long as I have been in the WordPress space and as long as I’ve blogged, I’ve known about them. I probably have used them off and on. But the last, I don’t know, maybe 2, 3 years, whenever I’ve tried to do a personal blog, I start it. I, you know, I was going to do a little personal podcast, I’ll start it and it just ends up sitting there or I just don’t do anything because I’m always thinking, oh, I got to create this content for it. And I always had it pigeonholed to be a certain kind of content, you know, whether it’s whatever. And now the way I’m doing it, I don’t really worry about, I’ve been almost doing something every day on it. It’s no longer a barrier for me. It’s not like, oh, what am I going to write my post today? It’s like I just suddenly have this thought or this photo to share or something, and it’s, I’d rather have it there than, you know, feed the machine somewhere else on a walled garden.

Derek Hanson: Yeah. And sort of that idea of make the internet weird too is I have full control over what that content gets to look like. So it’s not just that the content is owned by me and getting posted on my blog, but now with the power of AI, not only is publishing content much more efficient, so sort of like running into that hurdle of, well, I don’t have time or whatever. Well, I’m able to remove a lot of those barriers, but then also I built my own block theme based off of an aesthetic of a very well-known person in the rhetoric and communication and data visual space, Edward Tufte. Somebody had created Tufte CSS and I was like, oh my gosh, I love Edward Tufte. I studied him in grad school. And I was like, oh, but there’s no block theme. This is just a CSS framework, but there’s no block theme. I use WordPress. So I built Tufte Blocks, which is my own version of Tufte CSS, but for WordPress. And that theme is on GitHub. It’s open and free, so anybody can go try it.

But I’m building it out of a personal passion, essentially. And I’m able to make my post formats look the way I want my blog posts, my, everything about my blog, I get to make look the way I want. And it’s not super weird, right? And I think so, like, because it’s, it’s very like, you know, sort of technical and typography forward and typography first, but there’s certainly opportunity for you to make your blog look and feel however you want, especially now with AI. And, and yeah, so you’re, you’re saying, I think, a lot of the same things that I’ve been feeling lately. And honestly, I’m actually very newly adopting post formats, even knowing about them for a long time, but same struggle as you, like, oh, I gotta write this super polished essay. And I had this sort of self-diagnosis of, well, wait, if I don’t perform well, I’m not going to show that I have this writing background. It’s like, I need to just get rid of all those things. Like, who am I writing for? I’m writing for me. I don’t really care about the validation anymore. Do I want people to read my stuff? Well, yeah. I mean, that’s always gonna be there. But first and foremost, I’m seeing myself as the audience and that, hey, I don’t wanna lose track of this, you know, thought that I had real quick post format update done. And now it’s there and it’s more self-gratifying in that moment as it is opposed to sort of that external gratification, which I’m trying to not want as much anymore.

Bob Dunn: And one of the things I noticed is once I adopted post formats, which gave me so much flexibility, I was going through and I decided to name all my categories different kinds of hats. And what I did is I sat down and I actually picked out some different hats or concepts of hats and what they would mean now. If somebody just looks at it, they probably will go, you know, what is that? You know, fedora, that’s the category. Well, fedora is a more kind of serious kind of post and stuff. So I have party hat, I have a whole bunch of them that I did. So it also gives me again a little bit of guidance and a little bit of fun when I’m writing a post because now I think, oh, but what category am I going to put this under knowing it myself? And again, I did a post about the categories just for people would kind of know whether they, you know, search back or look for that. But I just, I want to do this.

Derek Hanson: Yeah, I love that. That’s so cool. Like, obviously, like, see, I’m wearing, you know, a baseball cap. You know, you could have your thinking cap. You can have, I mean, you could have…

Bob Dunn: Yeah, thinking cap is one of them. Yep.

Derek Hanson: You can take that in so many different directions. And, and that’s, so that’s the part about owning your blog, I think, that is extremely satisfying because it’s like, this is something I want to do. I’m not falling into the sameness of platforms, you know.

Even it’s like I tried Substack for a while just to see, okay, because, you know, I was into the trap of audience growth, like if you write on Substack, you’re going to get a bunch of subscribers, hopefully, because of the community aspect of this writing platform. And I’m still tinkering with it just to figure out, can you have a successful newsletter or publication from scratch with zero? But that’s not my primary place of my own content. And even though they’ve enabled these ways for you to make your publication unique with colors and layouts and sort of making this pseudo website builder for your Substack publication, you’re still locked into pretty much sameness, right? Everybody’s Substack is going to look familiar. And my blog is not familiar. It doesn’t look like anybody else’s because I crafted it with the help of AI tools. But I have massive knowledge of WordPress, you know, leading up to that. So I was sort of orchestrating Claude Code and Codex to build what I wanted. Uh, I could have done it myself, it just would have taken me a lot longer to get there for sure.

But I think that, that, that’s the beauty of, of moving. And again, like post formats becoming central to that process now is something that I think really enables me to let down the guard, let down the barriers and just like, hey, I have thought, just get it out there. And at any point too, here’s the other cool thing. At any point I could make my blog private and not have anybody go to it, right? If it was like, hey, this needs to be much more personal for myself, or you could do that on a post-by-post basis too. And I think that’s just having the flexibility to create something visually that is different than every other LinkedIn post because it’s just part of a social feed. It looks the same. So you can be more creative in what you’re doing.

Bob Dunn: Exactly. Yeah, I wasn’t going to go down this rabbit hole, but when I got in and started it and I was thinking, okay, where do I start with this new blog? I actually activated the AI agent. And I will say that has been an interesting experience. I’ve got to say I’m not totally sold on an AI building your site. And I think one of the things that I discovered was I know enough. I don’t, you know, I haven’t been doing it for so long. It’s quite a production for me to do anything basic, you know, technical-wise in the back. But I know enough that when I started saying this is what I want and stuff, you know, and things were going good, but then it was like I would get to this point where it’s like I wanted to say, you don’t understand me and what is going on here? Because this is normally where I would go and see this. And now I want to make a basic change that you seem to be having an issue with, and I can’t even go in there and do it because I don’t know where it is anymore or something. Anyway, it’s been a very interesting experience and I’m a very, you know, it’s an individual experience too, but it’s also something I think, wow, this is pretty amazing, you know, what it can do. And especially for somebody that does not have the skill set.

Derek Hanson: Yeah, I mean, actually that can go lots of different ways. That could be a total barrier to somebody who maybe you have not started your own personal blog and you go to start. And, you know, and this is just true for any, any platform that is enabling you to do this. It’s gonna lean AI first because that’s sort of the expectation. How quickly can you get a site the way you want without having any technical experience? So you, you end up almost probably getting a 50/50 split of AI delivered exactly what I wanted, and I might not have even known that that’s what I wanted from either a visual or a content layout perspective. Or it’s missing it, but you don’t know exactly what to tell it because you don’t have the knowledge of the platform and what you’re asking it to do.

So I think there’s, I’m going to be giving a talk tonight at my university where I did grad school. And I’m going to ground it still in WordPress sort of basics, because you need that foundational knowledge, at least at a base level. So if you start working with AI, you have the language to say, oh, I want post formats, or, you know, I want my header to function and look in this certain way. But does everybody know to call that part of their website a header? You know, or like, hey, I need to work on a single post template. Well, would you know that if you say, hey, I want a blog, I mean, AI is going to be really good for the most part about setting all these things up for you in advance. But when you get to the point where you’re wanting to edit things, but you’re not knowing exactly what to ask for, that can be a challenge.

Bob Dunn: Yeah, it’s like saying, you know, can you put this in the top part in the right-hand corner, you know, something like that. And it’s saying, okay, it’s logically thinking and you’re just staring at that spot and you hope to God it actually appears there and it, you know, kind of down there a little bit further.

Derek Hanson: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Like shooting in the dark sometimes. Right.

Bob Dunn: Right. And I know we had talked a little bit before, we were just going back and forth about something, I think around the post formats and the social and I think there’s this turn of frustration that some people are experiencing. Okay, I don’t want to be on this one anymore. And they’ll say on there, I’m going to, if they’re on one platform, they’re going to a different one because of various reasons. Right. Like, take example, they say, oh, I don’t want to be on X. You can now find me on Mastodon, or you can find me on Bluesky. And I’m just curious personally, for me, I haven’t been that person that says, oh, you can find me there. I’ll just go and start something there. But nothing has really clicked yet. And for me personally, and again, you know, this is, this is not to reflect how other people think or how they choose to be on one or the other. But to me, there’s this frustration of just keep these new platforms come out and you decide. And I know that’s slowed down because I think those people that are trying to start these new platforms are realizing, you know, it’s hard to get a lot of people to just pack up and move. And for me, it’s like I just got to the frustrated part where I pack up and move back to my blog type of thing. You know? I mean, do you feel like things have changed for you personally, just how your expectations around maybe certain social media platforms or overall has changed and you are starting to think, well, maybe that’s why you’re going back to blogging?

Derek Hanson: So the, I like the metaphor that people have used for a long time with open source and proprietary platforms is renting versus owning, you know, a property, right? I have made an, not a great effort to be on X because I know that is a place where so many people are and you can gain, you know, following and you can get, you know, visibility with your content, but that platform has made it much more difficult to operate with the space that you own, which is your blog. It used to be that you could write on your blog and you could auto-post that to X or Twitter, and there’s been many more technical and monetary barriers to that now.

So I have gravitated back towards my personal blog because, well, one, I don’t wanna rent spaces and get, you know, bounced around to Mastodon, Bluesky, X, Threads, you know, like you said, like there’s a new one. There used to be a new one coming out all the time, and that has dissipated a little bit because, well, because from AI, software is cheap now. Technically anybody could go clone X and build it themselves. But would it be a successful platform that you’re gonna gain millions of users for? Probably not. And I don’t think that’s a great strategy or approach. And what I’m finding is, hey, I can just write on my own blog because I own that content. It’s my home, it’s my own property, but I can push it out to other places as long as the other platforms accept it.

So I don’t like to go and publish 10 different places at once. So if I just publish from my blog and it goes out to LinkedIn, it goes out to Mastodon, it goes out to Tumblr, not that I ever use Tumblr at all, and it goes out to Threads. It goes to all those places and I only have to do it once just from my blog. And that’s where I have gotten to the point in how I’m managing my content because I just, I don’t want to spend time in places that aren’t going to give me value. The only time I spend within social media perspectives, and I call it social media, is LinkedIn, right? I get value from LinkedIn. I don’t really get value from X. So that’s the only app on my phone, actually. You know, I’ve deleted Instagram, I’ve deleted Facebook. I’ve just been deleting all these things because, well, what is the value I’m gaining from those platforms from my own content perspective? It’s like, well, not enough really to want me to stay.

Bob Dunn: Yeah. And they can be an incredible time suck. And they can be rabbit holes you go down on that, that just, you’ll never get back up from them because they’re deep and they go in all sorts of directions. But it’s, yeah, just, I guess it’ll be interesting to see how people start to, you know, I mean, there are always going to be millions of people on those platforms. I mean, to me, Facebook is a perfect example. It’s been around forever and ever. And people are, you know, I’ve talked to so many people that won’t leave it because of friends and family, or they use it primarily for that. And they just build it up and they feel like, you know, if they leave it, they’ll lose everything. I closed down all my Meta accounts at one, like 2 years ago or something because I just, and again, you know, I don’t want to get on the high horse and this is all personal. This is all how you view it, what makes you decide you want to do it or you don’t want to do it or you want to be there or not be there.

Derek Hanson: Well, yeah. Well, here’s the thing. So, so to kind of maybe like lasting thoughts. So one is, I, right before sabbatical, I had published a post called “Nobody Clicks Your Share Button Icons,” and my Jetpack app was like, your stats are booming. Like a couple days later when I was on sabbatical, I was like, what is going on? Well, it turns out that article got onto Hacker News and a bunch of people were chatting about it, and somebody else like wrote a response piece on their blog about it. And like, this is the part where I didn’t want millions of people to read it necessarily. I didn’t, you know, like this was something that I had been thinking about since grad school, honestly, when I was doing some research on my dissertation project. And I just wanted to write it and publish it. And it actually, you know, the sort of the rebuttal response sparked something, you know, in back of me. And I found a lot of value for that personally.

And like, that’s, you know, that could happen. But I’m not seeking more of that, you know, necessarily. I don’t need to have the next piece go on to, you know, Y Combinator or Hacker News or whatever. Like, if it happens, great. If not, I don’t care. I’m more interested in what I can publish and what I can do. So there’s a piece I actually, at the beginning of the year, and it took me a while to get to the, to this point now, but I wrote a piece called “Write More, Consume Less.” And that was another one that was, had a lot more like views and, and clicks and shares. Right. And I think because of it, of the content I was trying to say, and it was trying to be much more personal, but also to help others. Like, I just need to write more. I don’t need to consume as much on those platforms because, like you were saying, you can get sucked into the rabbit hole of just consuming and consuming and consuming. I think the only platform that I still am in that trap is YouTube. I get a lot of great stuff that I will start watching on YouTube, and so that’s my consumption trap still, but the other platforms, I’ve switched.

Like, I am writing and publishing more now as opposed to consuming more. And I think that’s the shift that you have to think about. And it doesn’t have to be digital too. You could certainly have a physical journal. And maybe that’s where people start to go next is to writing in analog, especially as AI continues to take over. Because I think that is a fear. Will people read my content and think, are you really writing this? You know, am I using AI? Yes. Is it writing for me? No. Like, so, you know, I don’t want to have to justify myself to everybody, but if they want to stop reading, that’s for them.

Bob Dunn: Yeah. No, I think out of this whole thing, it’s that what you just said, it’s doing something with no expectations. But if something does happen or something goes viral or a lot of people are reading it, hey, that’s great. You’re not living to write content like that. And if it drops in your lap, great. Well, this has been fun. We’re going to be popping on here every month and maybe we’ll bring somebody in and maybe Derek will find somebody else to talk to because he gets tired of talking to me, but you never know what the next month will bring you. But yeah, it’s always good to catch up. And I’m hoping that people will start to rethink a little bit about this stuff. And if it hits a nerve or gives them a little inspiration, so be it.

Derek Hanson: I hope so. And this is the part about community and open source that I love. If anybody listening to this or reads the Open Channels blog and is inspired to get started but doesn’t know where to start, like, you know, find me. I’d love to help with this type of thing, help you, you know, get your first post out or if it’s more about post formats, you know, whatever.

Bob Dunn: So what is your blog again? Tell us.

Derek Hanson: derekhanson.blog.

Bob Dunn: Okay. That’s it. Go check it out, everybody. Thanks again, Derek.

Derek Hanson: Yeah, happy to be here. Can’t wait for the next one, Bob.