A month of blogging
I started this site and blog around December 20, 2024. Since then, I’ve posted 13 times, including an earlier post today; 3 times in 2024, and added 9 posts in January of 2025.
Considering that my main goal in getting this up and running really was just to get it up and running, that’s not too shabby!
I did not, and still do not, have a specific aim for the site. If anything, I have too many purposes: I might use it as a place to stash personal and professional notes; to track progress on (vaguely) ongoing projects and recurring interests, like my attempt at Baking the Bread Bible; to share things that catch my eye; to post materials I’ve developed for work (syllabi, bibliographies, etc); and, ideally, as a place for germinating and growing ideas.
But even before I launched the site, I’d been thinking about the site and reading around the IndieWeb and related spaces for inspiration. There are two broad philosophies in this area that I’ve been engaging with a lot, philosophies that seem to contradict each other – but I think both will ultimately shape what this space is and becomes.
On the one hand, I’ve been following the lead of others in the IndieWeb and contemporary blogging world that emphasize quantity of posting… not quantity for quantity’s sake alone, but as a sort of practice that serves oneself and others.
There’s similarity and overlap between this practice and with private journaling, in both its form and its reason. I like what Dan Sinker just posted about the practice of journaling:
Because when the ground is shifting beneath you—as it was in 2020 and it is absolutely doing right now—writing it down gives you a solid foundation to remember what is really happening. It’s a way of being able to look back and ask “Did I really experience that? Did that really happen?” and see that, yes, it did. And, when a politician or a pundit or the president himself goes on TV and denies a thing you saw with your own eyes, you have the memory of what really was written down.
One reason to write right now - in public or in private - is to log the world around us for future reference, for reassurance of our memory as a meaningful record, and to enable remembrance at a time when those in power are actively trying to overwrite the past. I think this is what we often think of when we think of journaling.
But posting-as-journaling doesn’t have to be elaborate or confessional. I’m trying to take some cues from folks like Simon Willison. Willison encourages things like TILs and link sharing as practices that help us shake off the “mental trap” of trying to blog the new, the unique, the original:
[…] blogging doesn’t have to be about unique insights. The value is in writing frequently and having something to show for it over time—worthwhile even if you don’t attract much of an audience (or any audience at all).
This seems to me to be a lot like regular journaling. To put this another way: when one keeps a purely private journal, you do not wait for profundity to strike before putting pen to paper. Many journal practices encourage incremental capture of experience and observation: rather than wait for the end of the day to write one long entry, log the things that are important to you somewhat as they come. A journal can be a scratchpad, a task list. It doesn’t have to be comprised of fully-formed entries from start to finish.
This sort of approach to blogging makes me think of someone like David Sedaris, who captures notes on a small notebook throughout the day, then assembles them into larger journal entries later. Some of those entries later become essays or fodder for other writing. Whether explicitly or not, the practice of blogging to capture and share regularly, rather than waiting for profundity only, mirrors at least a part of that process. And I would argue that just the act of capturing by necessity contributes to later work, even if one isn’t conscious of it.
A regular digital writing practice on a personal website doesn’t need to center on a blog. The idea of digital gardens and unique slash pages encourage us to think of ways of writing outside the blog format. Chris Armstrong presents the spirit of digital gardens as being in stark contrast to that of blogs:
A blog structure places the highest emphasis on ‘what’s new’… but what’s new has had the least scrutiny and little authority. It also creates a pressure to publish something—anything—whether you have anything worth saying or not. It prioritises novelty over quality.
Every new post on a blog implicitly devalues other content on the blog, the same way today’s newspaper makes yesterday’s irrelevant. This is what’s new. That stuff is old.
I’m not sure I agree that blogging has to emphasize the new to the point of devaluing the old but I do appreciate the idea that digital gardens and similar structures embrace growth and change by emphasizing tending to items over time. Even though this seems to directly contradict the idea of quantity as a goal, I see these approaches as potentially very complementary. It really depends on the the use made of them by the author and, to the extent that it might be read, by the reader.
I’m still not sure what I’m building here, but I think I’d like it to reflect both of these tendencies: a somewhat chronological journaling, where the act of writing is as important as what is written, and something more thematic and episodic, that is developed over time. Part of the fun of having this space is figuring out what that looks like.
Key Links in This Post
- Dan Sinker, “Write It Down”
- Simon Willison, “My Approach to Running a Link Blog”
- Chris Armstrong, “Digital Gardening”