Simon Willison’s blogging advice begins with a deliberately abrasive instruction: lower the bar for prose before perfectionism turns a blog into a cemetery of unpublished drafts. In an Aug. 6 link post, Willison resurfaced an interview that Cynthia Dunlop conducted for her “Write that blog!” series in January, saying he had neglected to link it from his own site.
Willison’s point is about the publishing threshold, not a license to scatter unverified claims across the web. In the interview, he said writers should publish while they remain dissatisfied with aspects of a piece, because the alternative is often an expanding collection of drafts that go nowhere. Readers cannot compare a published post with the ideal version that remained in the writer’s head, he argued.
That distinction matters. In a January 2025 Hacker News comment posted under the account simonw, Willison said he deliberately accepts incomplete conclusions and posts that still do not please him. He also said he does not rush out work unless he is satisfied with its fact-checking and believes it to be true to the best of his ability. The evidence identifies those comments as self-reported, rather than independently verified measures of his process.
What does Simon Willison advise new bloggers to do?
Start publishing before the site design and editorial master plan have become another avoidance project, Willison said in the Dunlop interview. His minimal definition is unglamorous and useful: an entry with a date and a permanent URL is enough to count as a blog.
- Publish the first entry instead of waiting for a finished visual design.
- Do not let an ambitious content plan delay the work of writing.
- Give each post a date and a permanent URL.
- Add an Atom or RSS feed when possible, but do not treat one as a prerequisite to begin.
Atom is an XML-based syndication format for web content and metadata, according to RFC 4287. Willison called Atom or RSS important, but specifically rejected treating either feed format as a blocker for someone trying to get a first post online.
He also pushed back on traffic as the early scorecard. Willison said new blogs are unlikely to be discovered organically, but argued that the value of readers can outweigh their number. His example was practical rather than romantic: if a hiring manager reads a blog a candidate sends them and offers an interview, the site has already justified itself.
Willison has been publishing long enough to know the efficiency benefit of repetition. In the 2025 Hacker News comment, he estimated that short posts usually take him about 10 minutes and longer pieces one or two hours, attributing that speed in part to years of writing online. Those figures describe his own workflow, not a benchmark for everyone else.
The advice is less “publish anything” than “stop demanding finished-artifact polish from every post.” Keep the factual threshold. Lower the aesthetic one. Then publish another entry.
This story draws on original reporting from Daring Fireball.
