The Seven Voyages Of Steve
I’ve been thinking about what to do with my blog in 2025. I know I want to post more on it, but I’ve been wondering how to make it more… something. I thought about restyling or changing blog platform (still static generation), but nothing appealed to me.
Then I read this, about “digital gardens”: https://armstrong.is/miscellaneous/digital-gardening
I think that’s it. I don’t want a blog at all, newness doesn’t matter, I want a place to publicly share helpful content as effectively as possible
The Seven Voyages Of Steve
Helpfully, about 18 months ago I discovered Mkdocs, which I used for my SUDS Pro documentation (https://olddoorways.com/sudspro/docs/) and really, really liked. However it’s designed for docs not blogs really, so I kind of mentally ruled it out as a place for my blog. But that’s daft! If it think of my blog as more of a collection of categorised information, not as a date-driven update stream, it makes far more sense.
The Seven Voyages Of Steve
So I think I’m going to migrate all my most useful content across to mkdocs, with a nice index and perhaps a “recently updated” section, and stop thinking of my website as a blog at all. The whole point is that this information is not fleeting like social media, so why should it be organised like that, primarily date indexed? It makes no sense. How has it taken me so long to realise that? 🤦♂️
Juan
@sinbad like a a personal homepage! Reminded me of this: https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/
(Blogged about it here https://www.usebox.net/jjm/blog/digital-gardens/ -- and because *blog*, it is lost in a way)
The Seven Voyages Of Steve
@reidrac yeah I just read that post too, it’s one of the sources cited in in the one I linked to 🙂
It makes so much sense, you obviously realised earlier than I did 😄
John Kaniarz
@sinbad I’ve been thinking about restarting my blog and have the same desire. The best I came up with was “more pages and fewer posts” (in Wordpress terminology).
Are you still using Obsidian? Have you tried their site generator?
Rune Skovbo Johansen
@sinbad Nice, "digital garden" is a neat term. And like that other article says, that used to be the norm!
I never went away from a hierarchically organized website myself (despite a blog side-offering). I think I've always been in the digital garden mindset and I always had trouble getting any kind of overview on other people's blog-centric sites.
The Seven Voyages Of Steve
@jkaniarz I haven’t tried Obsidian’s generator, I’m not sure I’d want to use it for that. I really like mkdocs for published structured content, it’s real nice.
The Seven Voyages Of Steve
@GeekAndDad yep but importantly “updated date” is more important than original “posted date”. Not being a stream of updates and more a library resource also gives more incentive to revisit and update content
Dad
@sinbad For technical stuff it’s really helpful to include a date because things change so much you otherwise can easily be unsure if this something is still the state of things. Version numbers of platforms, tools, and so on really help also. It’s amazing how many posts there are missing this kind of important information, or even a date.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.