Starting again, with dates
Why this is a plain dated site and not something cleverer.
I’ve started and abandoned four blogs. The pattern is always the same: I write two good posts, then I have a half-formed thought, decide it isn’t a post yet, and never publish again. The thought doesn’t get finished — it just doesn’t get published, and then it doesn’t get thought about either.
The diagnosis I keep reaching for is that the unit was wrong. A Post, capital P, is too big a commitment for most of what I actually want to write down, and the commitment is what kills it.
So the fix here isn’t a clever information architecture, it’s a smaller unit. Three kinds of thing go in the same dated list: essays when I have one, short notes when I have a paragraph, and links to other people’s writing when they’ve said it better. A note that is four sentences long is a legitimate thing to publish. That’s the whole mechanism.
What I’m deliberately not doing is going back to revise. Writing about something that happened, or something I thought in a particular week, is a photograph. Updating it later would gut it — the date is part of what it means. If I change my mind, that’s a new entry, and the old one stays wrong in public.
Ask me in a year whether I kept it up.