6 ms·

My blog is a digital garden, not a blog

85 points by shrthnd 6y ago

saagarjha 6y ago
> Seriously, who cares when anything on my site got posted. I care, because it gives me context of how relevant it might be.
- sebdd 6y ago
  Sure, it should be mentioned somewhere. But chronological order isn't necessarily the most logical order for posts on a personal site's homepage.
  - smichel17 6y ago
    That's different than not having a date on the post at all.
  - uk_programmer 6y ago
    One of the things that is of constant annoyance is trying to find out when something was posted. Sometimes the time when it was posted is important, it allows me to ascertain how relevant the information therein is.
- wodenokoto 6y ago
  Yeah, I think the author missed the mark with that line too. Most peoples personal websites today are a series of articles, so of course dating them is reasonable, and sorting by it is also nice for the reader. Even online manuals, which should not be organized around chronology benefit greatly by having dates on them. We rarely see the 90's style homepages with "Here is my a list of my favourite episodes" and "This is my gallery of my favourite cats" anymore. But if you want to make your home on the web more about themes, than articles, then great.
- ecornflak 6y ago
  ok so this is helpful because I'm planning on starting a blog and want to use it to document some of the cool things I've done in the past. Would you (as a reader) prefer my trip to Norway to be dated when it happened, or when I published the article? I am mostly wanting to blog to curate my memories of things I done or thoughts I've had but I'd be lying if I didn't also hope it might help me make 'friends' online and find people with common interests.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    I think the best way to do something like that is date it when it was published, and add something like “in my trip to Norway in 2019,”
  - afiori 6y ago
    for something like this I would feel that the two relevant dates are when the facts happened and when the act of writing is set. As in if you are writing about a trip in 2002 and the page is written as if you wrote it soon after the trip then the date of publishing is not really essential (in terms of semantic html I think it would still be good etiquette to have is "somewhere" on the page, like in a footer, tagged as such, same thing for a "last updated" date) In this case I would say that is would be nice as a reader if I can understand what the date mean and if it was backdated or not.
skrebbel 6y ago
Note to the author: if I click the "Check it out" link near the bottom, the URL changes but nothing happens. Win10, Edge (pre-chromium I think).
ilikejam 6y ago
Why not just use a wiki?
- tonetheman 6y ago
  That is a great question... I could be off a bit here because I have looked at static site generators and blogging systems and only like 1 wiki setups (tiddly). I get the feeling and someone else who knows more should say I am off base that static site generators/blogging systems are easier to setup/use/customize? But yup I agree with your question, why not use a wiki... and I think the answer is interesting.
  - qznc 6y ago
    What would be the advantage of a wiki? To me it only seems to have downsides: Not using my local text editor and having to worry about web security. Why not just put some Markdown into a git repo?
    - kixiQu 6y ago
      I use tiddlywiki's node server and markdown plugin (behind a yubikey auth setup with nginx). It means that the data is stored in markdown files in a folder (with accompanying blah.md.meta files tiddlywiki maintains) but I can still edit easily from my phone, multiple computers, etc. there's a command to load files in (get the meta files and index in place), so I was thinking about using inotify to monitor a folder to be able to slurp in files from there, but I've been happy just editing through the browser and sometimes grabbing the .md files for use elsewhere. again, the killer thing for me is the portability. vim in a terminal is only nice when I have a keyboard; if I want to keep track of a movie a friend's recommending when I have my phone, being able to pull it up is great. also, plugins are key. org-roam has this for org-mode, but I haven't seen anything for vim that's as smooth as the backlinks setup I have in tiddlywiki, which is something like https://giffmex.org/gifts/tiddlyblinkexample.html https://giffmex.org/gifts/tiddlyblinkexample.html at the bottom of each note, autodisplaying snippets of context from other notes around links to that note. I also have it display a list of links to notes tagged with the name of that note. none of that is in the markdown files, just the view layer.
quanticle 6y ago
Gwern [0] also organizes his site in a similar fashion, for similar reasons. He writes for the "long now" [1] and organizes his site and his writing with people 60-70 years down the line in mind. Overall, I find gwern.net to be one of the best laid out and organized sites on the Internet. [0]: https://gwern.net https://gwern.net [1]: https://www.gwern.net/About#long-site https://www.gwern.net/About#long-site
- shrthnd 6y ago
  Thank you for sharing!
jlelse 6y ago
"Blog" comes from "weblog" and logs usually have some time of timestamp, right? Especially when using time-relative words like "lately", I always check out the date of the post to see how relevant this piece is. In addition to displaying a date on the post, I also appreciate dates above the content[0]. It's fine to have a curated homepage though. [0]: https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2019/11/dates-above/ https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2019/11/dates-above/
johnchristopher 6y ago
The problem is always the same when putting out a website: what's your content - your added value, who are your prospects/readers ? Sorting by date, CTA, content strategies, etc. come after you have answered those questions. Then you can focus on how best you can make your content and your readers meet.
AndrewStephens 6y ago
A couple of observations from someone who has a scattershot blog: * Nobody reads posts in chronological order. At best, they will find a post through a search engine or link and maybe glance at your homepage once. The most popular page on my site (by far) was something I wrote 3 years ago - it still gets hits but that doesn't translate into regular readers. * Nobody really follows blogs by subscribing to feeds. OK, obviously some people do but it is small fraction of site readers. And of those that do, only a small fraction regularly visit the sites they are subscribed to. The upshot is that you are better thinking of your blog as a set of independent articles rather than an actual Web Log. Publication dates are important to gauge how up-to-date the information is but almost no-one is going to scroll through a date-sorted index. If you want users to browse around after they have read the first article, implement some sort of Related Articles or tagging system to arrange your content by topic.
- Jaruzel 6y ago
  > Nobody reads posts in chronological order. No, people don't. Google however, does. Good SEO tells you to put a date based path in the URL (and in the page metadata). This helps Google work out how fresh your content is. If someone asks Google 'xyz' and you have a recent post about 'xyz' you will be ranked higher than many other 'xyz' posts.
  - Tomte 6y ago
    Does that really work? I would doubt that, without having any "SEO knowledge". Google should know when the web page was first posted or last updated, simply by crawling. And trusting a date in the URL just opens up the ability to game and abuse the system.
  - brudgers 6y ago
    You're advocating arranging my thoughts so a web crawling bot can sell more ads. Fuck Google.
    - hacym 6y ago
      That's not what SEO does. SEO is providing the ability for your webpage to be crawled easier so it can appear in Google's searches. If you don't want people coming to your site, then yeah, don't do it?
Funes- 6y ago
I'd like to ask the author if he would be willing to justify the text on his "digital garden". It would make for a better reading experience in my opinion. Also, your site would benefit from grouping or ordering posts by topic.
- dade_ 6y ago
  I hate reading justified text, so I guess I know why it exists. Some people like it, good to know.
  - Funes- 6y ago
    I guess you don't read many books or academic research, then.
kiwicopple 6y ago
My blog is also like this - https://paul.copplest.one https://paul.copplest.one Basically it’s a wiki of things that I stumble upon and want to learn later (mostly from HN). It’s not so interesting for general reading, but the cheat sheets and code snippets get a lot of use from my friends in tech (and from google it seems). I figure at the end of my life it will be a fairly complete knowledge base of everything I’ve ever learned
uneekname 6y ago
I have a similar concept for my site, with no publish dates and handwritten content/styling. One difference is that I haven't been using a static site generator, which I'm on the fence about using. On one hand it sounds like a much easier way to incorporate mixed media when I create a page, but on the other it feels like needless bloat for such a simple project. I like the word "garden" for this style of personal site, I might start using that.
andreyk 6y ago
I've sort of gotten away from thinking I have a 'blog', to thinking I have a 'personal website' which features my writing on there. I think 'digital garden' is a nice little metaphor for a personal website, and that 'digital museum' is perhaps even more accurate -- a curated and aesthetically organized set of artifacts that on the whole reflect who I am and my work / life. For the lamentation of chronological posts on here, don't see the big deal, you can tweak your website to have tag based or category based view too fairly easily; I have switched my website to have category based as the default view long ago but also offer chronological and feel quite happy with result: http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/ http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/
jslakro 6y ago
This is a powerful idea, week by week I read efforts from tech community for building personal information management tools. You just need to see Notion growth. Concept of organic wikis and that web 1.0 - 90's nostalgic idea with a bit of decentralized/self hosted content is absolutely a trend
andrewzah 6y ago
I'm also revamping my website (zola->hugo) and I was debating on whether to have a chronological list, or to separate my posts into cohesive groups. Such as Programming, korean, Self, etc. See [0] for an example. > Seriously, who cares when anything on my site got posted. One could argue it depends what the subject matter is. If it's about a javascript framework, I do need to see that date. What I have now is a boolean I look at for each post, which controls if the date is shown in the post listings (it is always shown on the post itself). Another argument is the date is relevant because it gives context to the discussion. Of course it would matter if a piece was written in 1829, 1929, or 1931, or even particular months in a year. Posts (and people...) don't exist in a vacuum. [0]: https://os.phil-opp.com/ https://os.phil-opp.com/
- follower 6y ago
  Would you mind sharing your reason(s) for moving from Zola to Hugo? When I last looked into static site generators Zola attracted my attention so I'm curious to know what your experience with it was. Thanks!
  - andrewzah 6y ago
    I have happily used Zola for the last ~2+ years. I'm migrating because I wanted to use asciidoctor instead of markdown, and hugo has better support. However I have to maintain a custom fork to get custom params to the asciidoc renderer, and to support asciidoc-diagrams. As far as I'm aware Rust has no good asciidoc crate so I would have to shave the yak and write my own implementation. Yuk. Zola and Hugo are very similar in features, except for i18n. For most people this isn't an issue, and it's being worked on for Zola. Also, Zola is written in Rust and Hugo in Go, so one might be more comfortable extending / forking one over the other. You can check out many Zola examples here [0] and the source code for my website here [1]. [0]: https://github.com/getzola/zola/blob/master/EXAMPLES.md https://github.com/getzola/zola/blob/master/EXAMPLES.md [1]: https://github.com/azah/personal-blog https://github.com/azah/personal-blog

85 points by shrthnd 6y ago

> Seriously, who cares when anything on my site got posted. I care, because it gives me context of how relevant it might be.

sebdd 6y ago
Sure, it should be mentioned somewhere. But chronological order isn't necessarily the most logical order for posts on a personal site's homepage.
- smichel17 6y ago
  That's different than not having a date on the post at all.
- uk_programmer 6y ago
  One of the things that is of constant annoyance is trying to find out when something was posted. Sometimes the time when it was posted is important, it allows me to ascertain how relevant the information therein is.
wodenokoto 6y ago
Yeah, I think the author missed the mark with that line too. Most peoples personal websites today are a series of articles, so of course dating them is reasonable, and sorting by it is also nice for the reader. Even online manuals, which should not be organized around chronology benefit greatly by having dates on them. We rarely see the 90's style homepages with "Here is my a list of my favourite episodes" and "This is my gallery of my favourite cats" anymore. But if you want to make your home on the web more about themes, than articles, then great.
ecornflak 6y ago
ok so this is helpful because I'm planning on starting a blog and want to use it to document some of the cool things I've done in the past. Would you (as a reader) prefer my trip to Norway to be dated when it happened, or when I published the article? I am mostly wanting to blog to curate my memories of things I done or thoughts I've had but I'd be lying if I didn't also hope it might help me make 'friends' online and find people with common interests.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I think the best way to do something like that is date it when it was published, and add something like “in my trip to Norway in 2019,”
- afiori 6y ago
  for something like this I would feel that the two relevant dates are when the facts happened and when the act of writing is set. As in if you are writing about a trip in 2002 and the page is written as if you wrote it soon after the trip then the date of publishing is not really essential (in terms of semantic html I think it would still be good etiquette to have is "somewhere" on the page, like in a footer, tagged as such, same thing for a "last updated" date) In this case I would say that is would be nice as a reader if I can understand what the date mean and if it was backdated or not.

skrebbel 6y ago

Note to the author: if I click the "Check it out" link near the bottom, the URL changes but nothing happens. Win10, Edge (pre-chromium I think).

ilikejam 6y ago

Why not just use a wiki?

tonetheman 6y ago
That is a great question... I could be off a bit here because I have looked at static site generators and blogging systems and only like 1 wiki setups (tiddly). I get the feeling and someone else who knows more should say I am off base that static site generators/blogging systems are easier to setup/use/customize? But yup I agree with your question, why not use a wiki... and I think the answer is interesting.
- qznc 6y ago
  What would be the advantage of a wiki? To me it only seems to have downsides: Not using my local text editor and having to worry about web security. Why not just put some Markdown into a git repo?
  - kixiQu 6y ago
    I use tiddlywiki's node server and markdown plugin (behind a yubikey auth setup with nginx). It means that the data is stored in markdown files in a folder (with accompanying blah.md.meta files tiddlywiki maintains) but I can still edit easily from my phone, multiple computers, etc. there's a command to load files in (get the meta files and index in place), so I was thinking about using inotify to monitor a folder to be able to slurp in files from there, but I've been happy just editing through the browser and sometimes grabbing the .md files for use elsewhere. again, the killer thing for me is the portability. vim in a terminal is only nice when I have a keyboard; if I want to keep track of a movie a friend's recommending when I have my phone, being able to pull it up is great. also, plugins are key. org-roam has this for org-mode, but I haven't seen anything for vim that's as smooth as the backlinks setup I have in tiddlywiki, which is something like https://giffmex.org/gifts/tiddlyblinkexample.html https://giffmex.org/gifts/tiddlyblinkexample.html at the bottom of each note, autodisplaying snippets of context from other notes around links to that note. I also have it display a list of links to notes tagged with the name of that note. none of that is in the markdown files, just the view layer.

quanticle 6y ago

Gwern [0] also organizes his site in a similar fashion, for similar reasons. He writes for the "long now" [1] and organizes his site and his writing with people 60-70 years down the line in mind. Overall, I find gwern.net to be one of the best laid out and organized sites on the Internet. [0]: https://gwern.net https://gwern.net [1]: https://www.gwern.net/About#long-site https://www.gwern.net/About#long-site

shrthnd 6y ago
Thank you for sharing!

jlelse 6y ago

"Blog" comes from "weblog" and logs usually have some time of timestamp, right? Especially when using time-relative words like "lately", I always check out the date of the post to see how relevant this piece is. In addition to displaying a date on the post, I also appreciate dates above the content[0]. It's fine to have a curated homepage though. [0]: https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2019/11/dates-above/ https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2019/11/dates-above/

johnchristopher 6y ago

The problem is always the same when putting out a website: what's your content - your added value, who are your prospects/readers ? Sorting by date, CTA, content strategies, etc. come after you have answered those questions. Then you can focus on how best you can make your content and your readers meet.

AndrewStephens 6y ago

A couple of observations from someone who has a scattershot blog: * Nobody reads posts in chronological order. At best, they will find a post through a search engine or link and maybe glance at your homepage once. The most popular page on my site (by far) was something I wrote 3 years ago - it still gets hits but that doesn't translate into regular readers. * Nobody really follows blogs by subscribing to feeds. OK, obviously some people do but it is small fraction of site readers. And of those that do, only a small fraction regularly visit the sites they are subscribed to. The upshot is that you are better thinking of your blog as a set of independent articles rather than an actual Web Log. Publication dates are important to gauge how up-to-date the information is but almost no-one is going to scroll through a date-sorted index. If you want users to browse around after they have read the first article, implement some sort of Related Articles or tagging system to arrange your content by topic.

Jaruzel 6y ago
> Nobody reads posts in chronological order. No, people don't. Google however, does. Good SEO tells you to put a date based path in the URL (and in the page metadata). This helps Google work out how fresh your content is. If someone asks Google 'xyz' and you have a recent post about 'xyz' you will be ranked higher than many other 'xyz' posts.
- Tomte 6y ago
  Does that really work? I would doubt that, without having any "SEO knowledge". Google should know when the web page was first posted or last updated, simply by crawling. And trusting a date in the URL just opens up the ability to game and abuse the system.
- brudgers 6y ago
  You're advocating arranging my thoughts so a web crawling bot can sell more ads. Fuck Google.
  - hacym 6y ago
    That's not what SEO does. SEO is providing the ability for your webpage to be crawled easier so it can appear in Google's searches. If you don't want people coming to your site, then yeah, don't do it?

Funes- 6y ago

I'd like to ask the author if he would be willing to justify the text on his "digital garden". It would make for a better reading experience in my opinion. Also, your site would benefit from grouping or ordering posts by topic.

dade_ 6y ago
I hate reading justified text, so I guess I know why it exists. Some people like it, good to know.
- Funes- 6y ago
  I guess you don't read many books or academic research, then.

kiwicopple 6y ago

My blog is also like this - https://paul.copplest.one https://paul.copplest.one Basically it’s a wiki of things that I stumble upon and want to learn later (mostly from HN). It’s not so interesting for general reading, but the cheat sheets and code snippets get a lot of use from my friends in tech (and from google it seems). I figure at the end of my life it will be a fairly complete knowledge base of everything I’ve ever learned

uneekname 6y ago

I have a similar concept for my site, with no publish dates and handwritten content/styling. One difference is that I haven't been using a static site generator, which I'm on the fence about using. On one hand it sounds like a much easier way to incorporate mixed media when I create a page, but on the other it feels like needless bloat for such a simple project. I like the word "garden" for this style of personal site, I might start using that.

andreyk 6y ago

I've sort of gotten away from thinking I have a 'blog', to thinking I have a 'personal website' which features my writing on there. I think 'digital garden' is a nice little metaphor for a personal website, and that 'digital museum' is perhaps even more accurate -- a curated and aesthetically organized set of artifacts that on the whole reflect who I am and my work / life. For the lamentation of chronological posts on here, don't see the big deal, you can tweak your website to have tag based or category based view too fairly easily; I have switched my website to have category based as the default view long ago but also offer chronological and feel quite happy with result: http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/ http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/

jslakro 6y ago

This is a powerful idea, week by week I read efforts from tech community for building personal information management tools. You just need to see Notion growth. Concept of organic wikis and that web 1.0 - 90's nostalgic idea with a bit of decentralized/self hosted content is absolutely a trend

andrewzah 6y ago

I'm also revamping my website (zola->hugo) and I was debating on whether to have a chronological list, or to separate my posts into cohesive groups. Such as Programming, korean, Self, etc. See [0] for an example. > Seriously, who cares when anything on my site got posted. One could argue it depends what the subject matter is. If it's about a javascript framework, I do need to see that date. What I have now is a boolean I look at for each post, which controls if the date is shown in the post listings (it is always shown on the post itself). Another argument is the date is relevant because it gives context to the discussion. Of course it would matter if a piece was written in 1829, 1929, or 1931, or even particular months in a year. Posts (and people...) don't exist in a vacuum. [0]: https://os.phil-opp.com/ https://os.phil-opp.com/

follower 6y ago
Would you mind sharing your reason(s) for moving from Zola to Hugo? When I last looked into static site generators Zola attracted my attention so I'm curious to know what your experience with it was. Thanks!
- andrewzah 6y ago
  I have happily used Zola for the last ~2+ years. I'm migrating because I wanted to use asciidoctor instead of markdown, and hugo has better support. However I have to maintain a custom fork to get custom params to the asciidoc renderer, and to support asciidoc-diagrams. As far as I'm aware Rust has no good asciidoc crate so I would have to shave the yak and write my own implementation. Yuk. Zola and Hugo are very similar in features, except for i18n. For most people this isn't an issue, and it's being worked on for Zola. Also, Zola is written in Rust and Hugo in Go, so one might be more comfortable extending / forking one over the other. You can check out many Zola examples here [0] and the source code for my website here [1]. [0]: https://github.com/getzola/zola/blob/master/EXAMPLES.md https://github.com/getzola/zola/blob/master/EXAMPLES.md [1]: https://github.com/azah/personal-blog https://github.com/azah/personal-blog