This Blog, BigLee’s Miniature Adventures, recently turned sixteen years old, which is a slightly alarming number when you realise it means I’ve been writing about toy soldiers on the internet for well over a decade and a half. In that time, almost everything about how we use the internet has changed, and so has how we share our hobbies. I now spend far more of my creative energy making YouTube videos than writing long blog posts, yet the blog is still here, quietly ticking over in the background. That isn’t an accident. It’s a choice, and one I’ve become more certain about as the years go by.
When I first started blogging in 2009, it felt like everyone in the hobby had their own site. You could bounce from one wargaming blog to another for hours, discovering new projects, painting styles, obscure rule sets, and historical periods you’d never considered before. At its height, my own blogroll listed more than six hundred other wargaming blogs. It felt like a vast, friendly convention hall, where everyone had set up a table to show off what they were working on. There was a real sense of continuity too; you could follow someone’s hobby journey for years, watching their skills grow and their interests shift.
That world has undeniably thinned out. Many of those blogs have fallen silent, some have vanished entirely, and others are frozen in time, their last post dated years ago. Part of that is simply life getting in the way. Blogging takes time and energy, and hobbies are often the first thing to be squeezed when work, family, and other commitments pile up. But it’s also about the wider changes in how we use the internet. Social media and video platforms offer faster, easier ways to share content. You can post a picture to Facebook or Instagram and get instant feedback with almost no effort. Compared to that, writing, formatting, and maintaining a blog can feel like hard work. So why bother?
For me, the answer lies in what blogs offer that those faster platforms don’t. A blog is a personal space. It’s one person’s voice, one person’s journey, laid out over time. It allows for depth and reflection in a way that short posts and scrolling feeds rarely encourage. When I write a long article about a project, a rule set, or even the hobby itself, I know that anyone who reads it has chosen to slow down and engage with what I’m saying. The audience might be smaller, but it’s often more invested.
There’s also the matter of permanence. Social media is designed to move on quickly. Yesterday’s post is buried by today’s, and within a week it might as well not exist. A blog, on the other hand, builds an archive. Articles written years ago can still be found, read, and used. I regularly hear from people who’ve discovered an old tutorial, battle report, or opinion piece of mine and found it helpful long after it was written. That kind of longevity is something I value deeply. It feels like leaving behind a trail of breadcrumbs for fellow hobbyists to follow.
The blog is also a record of my own hobby life. When I look back through the archives, I see not just finished projects but abandoned ones, experiments that didn’t quite work, and ideas that evolved over time. I can watch my painting improve, my interests shift, and my understanding of the hobby deepen. It’s a bit like an old campaign journal: sometimes cringeworthy, often messy, but full of stories and memories that would otherwise be lost.
That doesn’t mean I’m stuck in the past. Moving into video creation has been a hugely positive change for me. It allows me to reach more people and have more immediate conversations. But the blog still plays a role in that wider creative ecosystem. It gives me space to expand on ideas, share extra images and resources, and host the kind of long-form writing that doesn’t always fit neatly into a video format. In that sense, it isn’t competing with YouTube; it’s complementing it.
Blogs may no longer be the fashionable centre of the internet, but they are far from obsolete. They’ve simply found a quieter, steadier place. For hobbyists who care about recording their work, sharing knowledge, and building something that lasts, blogging remains a powerful tool. Sixteen years on, BigLee’s Miniature Adventures is still doing exactly what I hoped it would when I first started: capturing my miniature adventures as they happen, one post at a time.
And as long as I’m painting, gaming, and thinking about this strange, wonderful hobby of ours, I don’t see any reason to stop.
