Gardening, Digitally

I’ve become a lot more active with my website over the past year, and I intend to become moreso, but there are a few problems to overcome:

My creative process is often slow and chaotic. Much of the writing on this site evolved over multiple years: Regretting the Golden Handcuffs took almost two years to write, and Understanding Time Zones evolved over five years. This isn’t always the case, but I have a lot of ideas for things to write here which are still very much gestating.

To that end, I have through most of my life suffered from perfectionism. There’s a growing understanding that perfectionism is a trauma response which makes perfect sense to me, having recently gone through a lot of therapy to deal with the effects of undiagnosed ADHD, among many other things, and then writing an album about coping with lifelong depression. I’m done with it, and – especially as a person who evolves ideas through conversation – I want to embrace the idea of thinking in public.

The “blog” format is overly restrictive. I’ve been making web pages since 1995, and agree that blogs broke the web. Most systems for managing “content” make a faustian bargain by trading ease of management for the price of homogenity, in both format of that content and the organization of it.

Blogs broke formatting by requiring things to fit in templates. Even among web developers — who you’d think would want to push the medium — there’s a strong preference for a static site generator which uses some flavor of Markdown, whose overriding design goal is, and I quote:

The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.

As somebody who grew up in the golden age of desktop publishing, who remembers the early days of the web before anyone really knew what they were doing, who makes interactive web pages for a living, I look at most publishing engines and ask is that all there is to the web?

I want to do more things like Golden Times or Choosing Counties. I have data visualitions I haven’t published yet, I want to make the interactive harmony explorer from my music & math talk its own page, I want to make some interactive algorithmic art pages. I want to bring some novelty and play back.

Blogs broke organization by using only streams and tags. New content goes in the stream. How can you organize it? Linearly by time, or arbitrarily by tag. Neither method really works for what I want to do here.

When I initially chose Astro for the backing engine of this website, they didn’t yet have “content collections”, or any notion of ordered pages that shared a common schema. You just created files, exported their metadata, and did what you wanted with it. While made it hard to do things like the previous/next links I have in my footer, it was remarkably freeing because everything was just another page. I didn’t have to worry about where things fit in, I just created a page and there it was.

The collections feature is useful – my social media archive page would be much more difficult without it – but organization here is something I want to be more deliberate about.