Have I really launched a blog in 2026?

I remember my first blog. I must have been nine, a devoted reader of Les Débrouillards, a Québec science magazine for kids. Already a tech enthusiast, I was especially taken with their article on Blogger and the rise of these personal online magazines. I wrote about anything and everything. The result: the Débrouillards editorial team was very much alone in my blog's comment section.

The last time I put my writing out there like this was in university, for an e-commerce class where we had to set up a blog and try to rack up more pageviews than the other teams. So why do it again, seven years after that class and some twenty years after Blogger?

Why not just LinkedIn?

There's a lot of talk about digital sovereignty and Big Tech's grip on us, yet we keep handing these companies an enormous place in our lives. Professionally, LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft since 2016) has become unavoidable.

Even with a job I love, even without looking for a new one, the idea that my professional visibility rests almost entirely on a single platform doesn't sit well with me. Algorithms can change quickly and bury the projects we're working on. Companies can decide to put features behind a paywall and make them too expensive for what they return. On LinkedIn, I'm a tenant. Here, I own the place.

What a website gives me that LinkedIn can't

LinkedIn will keep being useful, I have no illusions about that. But a site I fully control gives me something else.

Independence. I choose the content, with no algorithmic filter.

Memory. A feed is fleeting. Here, my projects stay organized over time. Or in whatever order I like.

A playground. Designing (and maintaining!) this site lets me test tools, design and content. For someone in marketing, it's hard to beat.

What AI makes possible

The tech-obsessed kid I once was knew his way around HTML/CSS and PHP well enough to build websites. The adult I became, unfortunately, only has vague memories of it. AI bridged the gap between what I could imagine and what I could still code. I had a fairly clear idea of the site I wanted. I laid the groundwork, wrote up a spec, and Claude helped me build out the code.

At first, I was aiming for a simple link-in-bio page in HTML (largely hand-coded). Then my ambitions grew: a fuller site, with a dedicated, fully custom content management system. Today, I'm proud to see it live and to keep evolving it as new ideas and needs come up.

A few things I'm particularly proud of

• A homemade analytics system. Like any good marketer, I wanted some numbers on pageviews, users and the most popular content. With Québec's Law 25, though, adding a tracker like Google Analytics meant either legal exposure or a cookie consent banner, and neither appealed to me. So Claude and I built a small, basic analytics system that gives me the information I want to see while respecting the privacy of the people who visit my little corner of the internet.
• Written by an actual human. Yes, really, like this article. It's a purely human product, proofread afterwards by AI, which also lent a hand with the translation.
• A Projects section where I can showcase my own work as well as share articles published elsewhere.

What's next?

I plan to publish here at a probably irregular pace, whenever I have something to say: thoughts on marketing communications, what's happening in the news, and surely a few detours here and there. No rigid calendar, just the kind of content I'd want to read myself.

Thoughts?

I deliberately didn't ask Claude to build me a comment section. Honestly, I don't feel like moderating one, and turning into a discussion forum isn't the point of this site either. After all, I've already known the loneliness of a comment section visited only by the Débrouillards team. That said, if this article sparked a thought or raised a question for you, we can always talk about it.