Website Categories Considered Harmful

One thing blogs do that I’m jealous of is make posts that say “here’s what I think about X right now.” These posts are both content and time-based. Critically, a blog post is not claiming to be an authoritative treatise on a subject. And it often covers multiple subjects.

For example, a blog post might have a few short paragraphs about trying programming in a game engine like Godot, some thoughts on a movie, and new coffee making procedure that worked well.

In contrast, I feel like I’ve set up myself for putting writing into one of two categories:

1. Blog post: time-based “what am I up to” (life stuff only)
2. Post: authoritative “I’ve done my research” comprehensive treatise on a subject⁰¹

In blogs, I feel as if I shouldn’t cover anything of substance there because otherwise it should be squirreled away to go into a post proper. So it feels like blogs have no point. So I never write them.⁰²

Because my mental model is that a post will be highly edited, widely shared, and subject-focused, the barrier to making one is high. So I also never write them.

I feel that my writing output suffers due to this invented dichotomy. Productive bloggers—I only read a couple—attempt to publish on a particular cadence, and then include whatever they want in them. These are fun to read, because there’s diversity in the contents, each section is digestible,

But… they also often have sections for more polished essays and posts!

Proposal #

• Write into garage
• Embrace post series (notebook, study, etc.)
• If it’s interesting enough to share, promote it to post at some point
• (Or just share anyway)
• During wrap-up (weekly?) compile refs using fancy new embedding

Historical Angle #

2014 — First Website The genesis of my current website.⁰³ I only had some academic projects, a list of my open source tools, and a post on the website tech stack itself.⁰⁴.

2016 — First Essay My first blog post was about how I’d struggled to produce independent creative work over “the past seven years.”⁰⁵⁰⁶

2019 — Second website and my second post, Creative Friction, which was a reflection on the fact that I still didn’t post enough and trying to figure out why.

I came up with a bunch of ideas. Many valid psychological factors, but also the idea of “defining rigid categories:”

The way I had my old website laid out, everything I posted had to be filed under some kind of top-level heading (like “programming” or “writing”). This made it difficult to post exactly the kind of stuff that’s easier to make but harder to categorize: small notes, sketches, little projects.

And so, I added more sections to my website, like sketches (June 2019), and eventually The Garage, which was a big enough leap it deserves its own post.

2020 — Monthly Digest It’s wroth noting that at this point, I tried to reduce my posting friction by not emailing everyone on every post, but instead having a monthly wrapup.⁰⁷

2021 — Blog A new section explicitly devoted to being time-based (e.g., post weekly) rather than subject-based (i.e., an essay about X). I haven’t used the blog much. More on this above.

2021 —The Garage was an enormous step forward in both areas I’d identified in 2019:

1. Psychological barriers were reduced by calling garage posts “notes,” making them intentionally rough, small, editable, and written only for me.

2. Categorical problems were reduced by allowing them to contain non-essay content (like code, images, animations), and not giving myself any hierarchical tagging scheme.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was a relative explosion of content.⁰⁸ In particular, I still enjoy the fact that the posts aren’t featured prominently, so I don’t feel compelled to edit them too much.

2022 —Third website (Eleventy + Nunjucks). Also, critiquing digital gardens because they aren’t user-friendly (too much content).

2023 — Microblog, i.e., more categories, trying to reduce friction but also keep visibility low.