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Read the blog's archive page before the homepage and you'll save yourself an hour of garbage
I've been hunting for small blogs to follow for a while now, and last week I figured out a method that changed how I do it. I used to land on a blog's homepage first, read the latest 3 posts, and either bookmark it or move on. That wasted a lot of time, because a lot of writers are still finding their footing and their newest stuff isn't always what they do best. So I started doing the opposite: click straight to the archive or the oldest posts, usually at something like /archive or /page/12, and read what they were writing 2 or 3 years back. The difference was night and day. On a woodworking blog out of Missoula I almost skipped, the homepage was thin how-tos, but the 2022 archive had a 3,000 word piece on sharpening chisels with a $12 stone that was better than anything in the top ten search results. The old posts show you how a person actually thinks before they started writing for an audience. Same thing on a forager's site from Asheville: the early stuff was weird and specific and personal, the newer posts were tidy listicles. So check the archive first. Does anyone have a trick for telling if an old post is still worth reading, like looking at the comments or the date it got linked somewhere?
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the_cora3d ago
Check if the old post has a follow-up or update linked, since that shows the writer still stands by it.
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