I know blogs are more 2005 than they are 2025, but I think we can make blogs great again.

A bit of context. For about 15 years, I followed this guy on a blogging platform called Livejournal. He wasn’t a popular account. My guess is he had only a handful of readers. But I loved his writing style and the things he wrote about.

Despite not having my own Livejournal account, I would go to his blog each day to see if he had posted anything new. Sometimes, he would go days without posting, and some days, he would publish several posts in a matter of hours.

His posts mostly concerned his daily life as an expat living in Korea, but since he was anonymous like me, this gave him the freedom to write about things in a way that he might not have otherwise.

I would look forward to seeing his blog posts and, in simple ways, living vicariously through his words. He would write about his hopes and dreams, the struggles he faced, girls, getting fired from his job, finding a new job, adopting a dog, and anything else he felt like sharing about his life living in a small alley-way in Seoul.

His posts became a kind of escape for me, even if they were brief and only took a few minutes to read. Over time, I felt a genuine connection to him, because through his blog, I also discovered all kinds of new authors, movies, and music. I would occasionally leave him a comment, and over the years, we exchanged pleasantries from time to time.

Anyway, I guess my point is that I’m hoping this blog can offer something similar for those who are reading my posts. I want to share my knowledge and my journey, and hopefully, people will find it useful or at least somewhat entertaining.

Sadly, my anon friend eventually stopped posting, or I might still be reading his words to this day. But I can’t help but wonder if he would still be posting if there had been a way for him to turn his blog from being just a hobby to a business.

If there had been a way for him to charge people, even a small sum for his efforts, would that have changed anything? Maybe it wouldn’t have been enough to make a living, but what if it could have kept him motivated to keep going?

That’s what I believe the new PayButton plugin makes possible. Throughout the world there are flea markets, farmers’ markets, and swap meets where people try to sell their wares. Oftentimes, these people do this as a side hustle or a hobby, because they find it not only enjoyable but potentially profitable as well.

It offers away for people to test the market to see if there is a demand for what they’re selling without having to invest a ton of capital to lease an actual storefront or hire employees.

My hope is that we can create a digital version of these marketplaces, and the new PayButton WordPress plugin can be the engine that powers this new revolution.

While ProofOfWriting.com may currently be nothing more than a quirky little stall trying to carve out a space in the vastness of the Internet, I hope that soon I will be joined by other digital merchants and together create what will become a new and bustling online bazaar.

(250K XEC to the first person who can find the three missing words. Hint: they appear in order in the paid section this post, but in each case they are used somewhat incorrectly. Good luck! To check if the prize is still available, click here.

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