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My blog is my public notebook

· 3 min read

This website is sort of an experiment. It is implemented as a blog because blog software provide some useful features, but it has slightly different goals.

You could say it is dissimilar to, yet not entirely unlike1 a blog.

This post describes that dissimilarity.

(As of this writing, I have done none of this. These are just plans. README-driven-development, if you will.)

Blogging software provide these features I want:

  1. dated posts with the date in the URL
  2. RSS feed
  3. Tags for organization

What I want to build is somewhere between a traditional blog and a digital garden.

The posts in a Traditional blog are finished articles that are published with a certain date and then not touched unless something important changed.

The posts in a Digital gardens are living documents, show the last updated date and sometimes have "epistemic status".

TL;DR

the date of a post may not be what you expect, and the RSS feed might be chaotic.

Significant edits​

I like the idea of a digital garden, but those usually only show the last edit date in the body and exclude it from the URL. Tech moves quickly, so I need to differentiate between the date of the the most recent commit from the date I reviewed the content. So, while I might make minor edits such as adding tags, or linking to other posts, when I make significant changes to the prose, or add new information, I will repost it with the new date, and redirect the old URL.

Backfilling​

Most of these posts start their life as notes about some problem I solved for work, or a side project. When I publish then here, I typically keep the original date (again, unless I made significant edits). This probably means the RSS feed will be a bit chaotic.

Notes, not posts (mostly)​

I write for 2 audiences on this site:

  1. My future self, who is trying to remember how to do this thing (and incidentally, anyone who happens to have the exact same problem and stumbles on this site)
  2. One of more of coworkers, usually expanding on a topic we discussed at work.

(1) make up the bulk of my posts. They are meant as reminders, so they might be terse, or have bold text in strange places. They will also be tightly focused.

(2) are less common. They are more like essays, meant to teach or convince.

There may be less difference in the future as I'm planning to try out the "mini-essay" approach to notes.

Footnotes​

  1. for you Hitchhikers Guide fans ↩