Logbook

Converting hot takes into a proper weblog

I wonder what my blog would look like if I took my hot Twitter takes and wrote 500 words on each rather than 280 characters.

(Yes, I still have a blog, a couple of them actually.)

The instant publication of a tweet is very appealing, with a quick hit of dopamine possible if you happen to get really lucky and write something that triggers a quick response. That's great, in the same way that a rat pressing a lever thinks that getting fed is great.

In the olden days of web rings and RSS feeds and Google scooping up all of the blog content it could find, posting to a blog felt a lot more "live". If you wrote about something that people were searching for right at that moment, there was an opportunity to do serious numbers. Those days are mostly gone, with changes to the world leaving blogs behind as the source of hot news.

The biggest advantage of the blog format over the tweet (aside from its absurd length) is that you have a lot more room to ponder an idea and a lot more space to link out to other people's takes on the same subject. The writing has some space to breathe, there's a lot more chances to edit, and the shelf life of the words is a lot longer.

Not many people read blogs though any more so they fail for general audience seeking. We're in the Newsletter Era, so I suppose the reasonable option is to somehow cajole people into signing up for everything you publish. Direct email does increase the chance that any given thing will be read. The downside I guess is that readers expect to write back! Suddenly your hot take is an extended conversation and maybe you were just chasing a passing interest rather than a deep thought to ponder.

One thing is for sure: when you write blog instead of a tweet, there's a whole lot more time spent typing your own ideas, and a lot less time hitting the refresh button hoping someone else somewhere in the world has said something interesting. I can get into that.

Obsidian as a daily note taker, a year out

I started using Obsidian about a year ago, and switched away from Github Issues about six months ago. So far so good. As is my habit, here's some notes on the process that will probably be more useful to me than they will be to you, but that's the nature of blogging these days to write notes to yourself mostly.

Obsidian has completely captured the "daily diary" part of my daily routine, as well as the "write down what you're going to do today before you do it", and the "take notes in wiki format". All of that is about 80% of what I need, and so it gets repeated daily use on my laptop.

Surprisingly, even though I can and do sync my laptop with my Android phone, I don't really use Obsidian much on my phone! To the extent that I do, it's for lookup rather than typing. I guess part of that is that the computer is so much faster as an input device that for any writing of any length I'd rather be at a full sized good keyboard.

When I gave up on Github Issues for daily tracking, there were 10000 issues that I had gone through, and I could tell you with some certainly how long various items had been on my todo list. And you know what, that's not a knowledge about myself that I miss having. I write things down and then I do them or don't do them. The process leaves enough of a trail that I can reconstruct my thoughts. I'm not really reporting out to anyone else the progress towards any one specific goal, so there's less unfinished business to worry about.

Is there unfinished business? Of course. It's just that's accepted as a normal course of events, and you get to things because you remember them and not because there's some Master List Of All Undone Tasks that you consult before taking on the next iteration of your day.

I love Obsidian as a daily note pad, and I really like it that I can bop around in about 1600 separate pages that are a fair capture of a year's worth of doing things and feel at least to a certain degree that it's a connected whole.

At 1600 pages a year, it's about six years when I hit the 10000 page mark. That would be a nice body of work, and by then some other system for writing will probably be available on some shiny new computer and I'll want to start over again from scratch. But until then - this is pretty nice, and I intend to keep at it. (Check back in 2027 and see if I still am thinking the same way.)

notes to future self, and the Blogger's Secret

A lot of years ago, I came up with this plan, which I called the Blogger's Secret

1. Pick a topic.
2. Write about it twice a day.
3. In six months, you will be an expert on that topic.

At that point I noted

One constraint that is clear at the start is that your blog constructed for this purpose cannot be about anything and everything that comes to mind; as soon as someone describes it as eclectic or has a hard time pinning down what you are doing, you have strayed from a purpose.

I am hopeful that this weblog, by staying on the straight and narrow about regular and routine writing about a relatively narrow set of topics will prove fruitful.