Blogging

There was a time when owning digital space seemed thrilling, and our personal sites motivated us to express ourselves. There are signs of a resurgence, but too few wish to make their digital house a home.

Digital gardening is the Domestic Cozy version of the personal blog. It's less performative than a blog, but more intentional and thoughtful than our Twitter feed. It wants to build personal knowledge over time, rather than engage in banter and quippy conversations.

I think the whostyle makes a few arguments. Among them:

• Text is more than a string of character codes. Its design matters, typography and layout alike; these things support (or subvert!) its affect, argument, and more.
• The web should be more colorful and chaotic, along nearly every dimension. The past five years have brought a flood of new capabilities, hugely expressive — let’s use them!
• Quoting is touchy, and anything you can do to cushion it with respect and hospitality is a plus.

An audacious attempt to reshape blogging, to see where it can go next!

Podcasts and video have really taken over - to the extent that it feels like reading may be falling behind. Can we enhance text and imagery on the Web? Try to give blogging new life?

I have appropriated from Brian Eno and others the distinction between architecture and gardening, and have described my blog as a kind of garden. But lately I’ve been revisiting the architecture/gardening distinction and I have come to think that there is something architectural about writing a blog, or can be – but not in the sense of a typical architectural project, which is designed in advanced and built to specifications. Rather, writing a blog over a period of years is something like building the Watts Towers.

Simon Rodi didn’t have a plan, didn’t even have a purpose: he just started building. His work was sustained and extended by bricolage, the acquisition and deployment of found objects – and not just any objects, but objects that the world had discarded as useless, as filth. You put something in here, then something else, you discover, fits there … over time you get something big and with a discernible shape. Not the regular shape envisioned in architectural drawings, but nevertheless something that can be pleasing or at least interesting to look at – an organic and irregular shape. A geometry of irregular forms.

For several years now I’ve been writing about the distinctive virtues of blogging, which has become, I keep saying, a seasoned technology that promotes lateral thinking.

...You have to have a peculiar kind of mind to enjoy blogging, and even those who have such a mind might prefer platforms that enable certain modes of interaction that blogging doesn’t make easy. (For instance, speedy exchanges.) I dislike those modes of interaction, and I love to blog, so I will continue to do this.

But as Robin Sloan says in a comment I quoted the other day, “Publishing on the internet is a solved problem; finding each other on the internet, in a way that’s healthy and sustainable … that’s the piece that has never quite fallen into place.” A while back I asked a question about this: “How can I encourage readers of my blog to seek some of the benefits that I get from it?”

I do increasingly feel like that Japanese guy who paints in Excel.

I’ve been musing for a while now on the way blog posts are typically presented—in reverse chronological order. This format has never truly made sense and does not reflect the way good writing and thinking happens.

...The main issue with the ‘pile’ system is that this post is eventually buried beneath more recent pieces of writing; there is no incentive for revisiting or updating the work. Even worse, if an author does decide to unearth the piece and make some major changes, those who read the original piece are not made aware of these alterations. The sorting order is static.

I've written over 3,000 blog posts throughout the years. This blog has become a repository of my thoughts, feelings, experiments, hopes, and creations.

It has also become outdated, buggy, and suffers from link-rot.

So, every day, I tend to my digital garden.

...Sometimes the work is delightful - finding a prescient post from a decade ago. Sometimes it is frustrating - being unable to find a vital-but-long-dead link. And sometimes it is sad - seeing how much or how little the world has changed.

But, mostly, it is meditative. We do our best to fight against decay, but entropy always wins in the end. Every link eventually withers and every truth is eroded by time. Nevertheless, we continue.

Something like an essay that Shigesato Itoi writes every day.

There is no denying that RSS is having a moment again. Not only because it allows us all to improve the discoverability of our work and explore online content in a personalized and deliberate way, but also because it remains one of the most powerful and influential technologies of the open web.

Eschew anything beyond writing the content of a post. No art direction. No social media imagery. No comments. No webmentions. No analytics...Imagine stripping away everything in the way of writing until the only thing staring you back in the face is a blinking cursor and an empty text file. That’ll force you to think about writing.

...[And] write for you, not for others. And if you can’t think of what to “write”, document something for yourself and call it writing.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the mystery of blogging, it’s that the stuff you think nobody will read ends up with way more reach than anything you write thinking it will be popular.

So write about what you want, not what you think others want, and the words will spill out.

My sense is that RSS is having a mini resurgence. People are getting wary of the social media platforms and their rapacious appetite for data. We’re getting fatigued from notifications; our inboxes are overflowing. And people are saying that maybe, just maybe, RSS can help.

This webring is an attempt to inspire artists & developers to build their own website and share traffic among each other.

1. Own your domain and use simple technology
2. Never change the technology
3. Write something on a schedule

Use feeds to subscribe to websites and get the latest content in one place.

Feeds put you in control. It’s like subscribing to a podcast, or following a company on Facebook. You don’t need to pay or hand over your email address. And you get the latest content without having to visit lots of sites, and without cluttering up your inbox. Had enough? Unsubscribe from the feed.

You just need a special app called a newsreader.

This site explains how to get started.

Collections of articles, links, and other material from around the web, relevant to software design and engineering.

I still believe in a Kindle/Analogue-esque device that, within it, contains an operating system that is half Patreon, half Substack, half Instapaper.

I think of this as the Republic of Newsletters writ large—The OmniBlog—where writers can publish their work and folks can subscribe via RSS but with a Coil-esque payment system built in and preloaded onto a physical e-reader. Writers could blog away, connected to eachother, whilst readers could subscribe to their work and perhaps even fund larger pieces of writing...

Shit, I just described Medium huh.

The inverse-chronological colly on the front page is exactly what I didn’t want to end up with. I have tried my damnedest to keep everything on this site as temporally neutral as I can make it. I even intentionally leave the dates off the documents. Temporality only matters if you’ve already read everything and you want to see what’s new or changed, like if you’ve subscribed to a feed. Which is exactly what that is on the front page.

Why care so much about a stupid personal website? Well, aside from the fact that this is the only entry website for how I make all my income - MORE IMPORTANTLY I think it’s the cure to loneliness.

As you get older it’s harder and harder to meet new people, expand your circles and show up in new spaces. But my website is a little antidote. Just last week I had 6 coffee meetings and zooms with people I’d never met before. What a time to be alive!

As I’ve said before, the unit of blogging is the conversation.

Platforms are like Rumpelstiltskin: they promise to spin you some gold, but in the end demand your first-born child.

One thing I love about the blogging world right now — and by “world” I mean the “webdev tech blogging world” that I live in — is that there are very few, if any, substantial monetary incentives. All the incentives to make a living producing content are over on other platforms, which means those who are blogging are doing it out of love, passion, or some other reason that’s (yet) to be tainted by substantial outside influence.

...Love, passion, and curiosity — more than money — fuel the majority of posts that show up in my RSS feed every day and I love it.

Forget the days of Google Reader, now is a golden era of blogging.

Slack turned ten this week and is still as central to most people’s work lives as ever. But what used to feel like fun is now anything but: it’s a distraction machine. It’s a conveyor belt of FOMO, keeping us glued to our phones at all hours. It’s a tool that lets anyone distract everyone with each new message.

Slack fixed so many problems with email but has now made it easy to mistake motion for progress. Ah, look how much work I am getting done! you think to yourself as you bounce uncontrollably between a dozen threads and channels of varying importance.

...Chat should be an escape hatch, a space for small ideas and quick questions. But we shouldn’t be making company announcements or sharing project updates in the same text box we use to say “good morning” to the team.

We believe that posts are the sweet spot between chat and docs, and they create a calmer, context-rich way of collaborating with people across projects and time zones.

So we’re not trying to build a new Slack at Campsite. We’re trying something different — and we might not get it right!

The idea of “evergreen” content naturally contrasts with its opposite. I am going to call that non-evergreen content “deciduous” because I wasn’t bullied enough as a child.

The history of the internet is filled with people from traditional media finding out about a new way of doing things online, dismissing it as frivolous and unworthy of their time, and then getting histrionic when that new thing succeeds despite their disapproval.

This is a blog that is truly written for the purpose of me using my keyboard because it feels nice.

...The keyboard I’m typing on right how has linear switches, specifically Gateron Yellows. I normally prefer tactile switches, and clicky ones beyond that, but when I do dabble with some nice linear ones on occasion… I get it. It’s so smooth. I feel like I’m just typing on butter. Wow.

I feel like I should probably have more purpose to this blog post but I genuinely don’t know what else to write about right now.

A rule of thumb is that the importance of a blog in your feed reader is inversely proportional to their posting cadence. Prioritise the blogs that post only once a month or every couple of weeks over those that post every day or multiple times a day...Building up a large library of sporadically updated blogs is much more useful and much easier to keep up with than trying to keep up with a handful of aggregation sites every day.

A personal site offers a dedicated place to experiment across the entire tech-stack; not a deliverable for a client that is handed over and then never touched by me again. A personal site is a place to try out that new API, see what can be done with CSS, truly discover what the Web can be.

Quotebacks brings structured discourse to blogs and personal websites.

Quotebacks makes it easy to reference content and create dialogue with other sites by turning snippets of text into elegant, self-contained blockquote components.

A primary motivation for creating my Stream was the paralysing sense that a blog post needed appropriate length and weight. Since switching to Kirby, there’s relatively little friction to posting, but there’s definite friction in evaluating a post’s worth to the reader. I’d think to myself, “I’d like to write something about that, but I’ll have to come up with all sorts of extra stuff and dressing, and it’ll take all afternoon.”

And so, I was increasingly aware that I was letting many interesting or essential thoughts go undocumented, allowing them to drift from memory, or exist only on social media, likely to one day evaporate. I’ve become more and more interested in the human desire to document, and it’s something I’ve always valued, so I needed to find a solution that I could entirely control and own. That solution was my Stream.

I hadn't realized that Medium had made JavaScript a requirement to be able to read any Medium post - I'd had JS disabled for ages on Medium just because of all the extra cruft they added.

But now, without JS, you only get the first few lines of content, and the rest is loaded entirely with JS - which is...stupid.

Scribe fixes all that and focuses entirely on the author's content.

Why Would I Want to Use This?

• You believe in an open web
• You believe more in the author than the platform
• You don't like the reading experience that Medium provides
• You object to Medium's extortionist business tactics
• You're concerned about how Medium uses your data
• Other reasons