Here’s one more reason to write (or syndicate) to your blog instead of post directly to social media: you can use web search engines to find what you need.

I hear a lot of people complain about the crappy search in Twitter or the lack of search in Mastodon, but this won’t be a problem if you post to your site and let public search engines crawl it. They’re incentivised to make sure their search is good, so you’re more likely to get better results more quickly.

Honestly, it works. I used it today to find a post from a fellow Micro.blogger that I wanted to reread. A site:<url> query with a few keywords. Found it in 5 seconds. I can’t imagine how long it would’ve taken if I had to track it down in Mastodon.

Obviously this won’t work for posts from others, unless they too write to their blog. But it’s probably still worth doing for others that enjoy your work. And who knows? It might be useful to yourself one day. I know it has been for me.