I have blogged on-and-off since 2002, always with the purpose of sharing. As a model of writing, there was pressure to perform and write something of value. My style has been to freely share what I know but there were times when I couldn’t write because the topic was too close to work life.
Blogging is inherently date bound. Most blogs have URLs with a YYYY\MM\DD or similar proving how intertwined the content and date are. It leads to a mindset where each post needs to be self-contained. Subscriptions, via email or RSS, feed the latest post to readers without them needing to visit a website. So, though seemingly more permanent than the stream of micro-blogging from X, Facebook etc., blogs are still in the stream and old content becomes quickly irrelevant simply because it is old.
Date driven writing is incompatible with a Digital Garden. Here content is meant to be reviewed and updated, and even Evergreen notes are subject to revision if necessary. Blogs aren’t meant to be touched. The subscription mechanism doesn’t re-post articles that have been modified. Blogging platforms also make posts difficult to link, which is in contract with inter-linking benefits of digital gardening. The best grouping comes from categories or tags. If further organisation is required, such as a Map of Contents, it can be done, but each page must be individually linked. In short, too much work.
For these reasons, and to help focus me on the quality of what I’m sharing rather than pushing content out, I’ve decided to stop blogging via my website. Instead, I’ll use Mastodon to micro-blog anything I want to say that’s not relevant to my digital garden. I may use something like a Now page to provide a list of updates but I have not yet decided how.
Existing blog pages will either be:
- Moved to notes, or
- Deleted if there is no note to be found.
I do know that before uploading any further historical blog posts, I should prepare the ground a little better and save myself some work.