Since switching to a new blogging platform and writing in English, I have rediscovered a community. In the early days of blogging (early 2000s), I was part of a group of authors who wrote a lot about the Art of Blogging. We wrote and published about different platforms, upcoming technology like RSS and podcasts, communities in the blogosphere. We organized award shows and meetups. Over the years I lost this community, due to social media, loss in interest, other work. I continued to write relentlessly. On my blog and I wrote a book called Bloghelden (Blog Heroes) about the history of blogging in the Netherlands. (Free to download on Github, in Dutch)

Since November, I no longer write exclusively in Dutch and have switched to another bloggingplatform, that is tied to a social network. I notice that the reach and engagement of my posts is increasing. My posts about blogrolls and the link list about blogging are reaching a larger audience. Plus, I’m having fun conversations about them, both in the comments and outside.

On my old blog, I wrote Dutch-language posts on these topics. On how your domain is your mothership, how blogging is the equivalent of punk rock publishing and how decentralization makes for a better Internet.

But these are Dutch-language posts. I sometimes want to link to them, but starting from an English-language post feels like a strange path for me to follow. Now I can choose from these routes:

  1. Don’t worry about that strange path, the reader will figure it out for themselves if they would like to translate your page into their language.
  2. Link to a translated page using Google Translate (Is there an independent alternative for this?).
  3. Add a translation to the original page
  4. Translate the original page at the original URL
  5. Translate and republish the original page on my new blog. With a canonical link to the original version (is that possible in micro.blog?).

There are pros and cons to every option. And I haven’t figured it out myself yet. So I’ll let this simmer for a while until a preference bubbles up with myself or with you….