blogging
8 conversations about this topic.
Comparing Digital Gardens to Blogging
A Different Audience I am the primary audience of my Digital Garden. When I’m blogging, the audience is primarily an external reader. Writing for myself means I’m happy leaving something half-baked knowing I may come back it later. When I blogged, there was a different pressure and everything needed to be done before publishing.
My Decision to Stop Blogging
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.
Wordpress to Quartz
For the last year or so I’ve been publishing my blog on Wordpress. I began using Ulysses.app to write in Markdown and publish to Wordpress, then about March this year I started publishing directly from Obsidian. Either way, there was practical and cognitive friction in the process. Multiple steps to go though, and writing was sitting somewhat external to Obsidian.
RSS Remains an Important Technology
I’ve written several times over the past 20 years that RSS feeds are important yet can be a hinderance as much as a help. RSS Gathers News and Audio to Me I use them extensively in my news reader (currently News Explorer) to go out to websites that offer a RSS feed and pull the news to me. I don’t have the time to visit every site and see if there is something new to read.
Writing is a Concernful Activity
Sometimes, we don’t know what is important, and blogging, journalling and writing in general are ways to discover that. To go meta, these are all forms of conversation and without conversation figuring out anything is impossible.
Workflow for Importing my Old Blog Entries
Since discovering my old blog entries I’ve been developing a workflow to import them into my current Wordpress blog. Spanning 2002–2012 there is value in bringing it all together, even if it takes some time. There are a lot of ideas in there which were valuable at the time, and are still valuable now.
Ideas are Better in Bed
Conversations such as blog posts that I write in my head lying in bed or when walking are always better than they end up when I type them. I wonder if it’s because typing is simply physical and there is less emotion accessible in the moment.
An Observational Blogger
I’m primarily an observational blogger. Throughout the day I’ll notice something and think, “I wonder if that’s an example of…” and I’ll use it as the prompt to share what I’ve observed. There are three reasons for this. Writing helps my solidify my observations Observing helps be become better at understanding what’s working for me and what isn’t It prompts thinking in other readers such as yourself.