#blogging

I’m finally getting around to publishing a link blog! And what better post to start off with than Simon Willison talking about his approach to maintaining a link blog.

A slightly self-involved concern I have is that I like to prove that I’ve read it. This is more for me than for anyone else: I don’t like to recommend something if I’ve not read that thing myself, and sticking in a detail that shows I read past the first paragraph helps keep me honest about that.

This is important to me too, but I’d like to prove it to myself more than anyone else. I’ve wanted for a long time to more critically engage with things I read online, and hopefully this link blog will make me read and understand more deeply than I would otherwise.

It’s part of a larger effort to spruce up my website and self-hosted setup that I’m very excited about!

I’d really like for this website to be around in 20 years. And that means this website won’t be around in 20 years. It’ll have been Ship-of-Theseus’d out of existence multiple times over by then.

It’s really quite a freeing realisation, because it means I can quit obsessing over the little details and actually do the thing that matters, which is writing for this blog. It doesn’t matter if the padding and margins are inconsistent in some places, nor does it matter that the code I use to generate this site is a bit messy and could be refactored. The only thing left five, ten, twenty years from today will be my words, not the pretty frame around them.

Obviously, this isn’t to say I’ve stopped caring about the appearance or accessibility of my blog. I could never do that.

But in general, I think I should take myself less seriously. Do things that aren’t perfect, or great, or even good. Too often, I’ve found myself losing motivation for a project or putting it off indefinitely after setting unreasonable expectations for myself and quickly realising I won’t be able to meet them. In some cases, many cases, it’s okay if what I make is “bad”, because at least it is, as opposed to just a daydream rotting away inside my head. If there’s potential there, then my first iteration is never going to be the final iteration anyway!