Young blog. Wants to have an index when it grows up.
I’ve thought a lot about how to organise information on this website. My vision is to write articles which will be part of larger series. I want to write in depth about complex topics, but break things up into smaller pieces. That will make it more doable for me and more accessible for readers. Mostly, I want to write useful stuff about topics and I want it to be navigable and findable.
Personal websites often contain very interesting information, but lack a good way of browsing or searching. This seems to be because personal websites default to the blog structure which is great for following along in realtime, but not great for any other way of accessing the site’s contents. I don’t know how often I’ve been trying to find one particular blog post that I read previously, with no better interface to do so than the chronological ‘archive’ list. 1
Or, equally annoyingly, I will have read a really useful article on some particular topic, and the only way to see if the author has written more on that topic is to click through the archive one article at a time. 2
For example: years ago some people built a really cool strawbale dome structure and they documented it on a Blogspot blog. In this example, a blog was a perfect fit for the original intent of providing project updates. but I discovered this site later and was interested in learning all I could about the construction techniques used. The only interface for doing so was to click through all the blog posts one by one, in chronological order, sifting through the many random updates (‘still waiting for dry weather’) hoping to find the more substantial write-ups about materials and techniques.
Now: lots of people want to write blogs and that’s fine. For people I want to follow, I will subscribe to their chronological feed and I can bookmark individual articles as they come by and I find them interesting. But for sites that provide lots of information that will be useful in the future, like a website about strawbale construction or one about programming techniques, another format is necessary.
Lots of people don’t have the time or interest to classify all their articles. It is a lot of work. But I will need a format like that if I want to realize my vision for my personal website.
All that to say: I want to develop a website with the interface of a good documentation site, but a personal voice.
Footnotes
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It can get even worse when people, perhaps out of a desire to add some stucture to their archive, nest everything in years and months. Now you lose the overview, and the number of clicks and pageloads doubles or triples. Blogspot is a great example of this. Tags and categories can work better—if the author is good at using these. UPDATE—it seems Blogspot now has an expandable/collapsible tree of years/months, which works a lot better; see the blog linked in the article. ↩
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It can help a bit if the archive page shows page titles, but not always. Titles aren’t always a good representation of salient topics in the body. This article is a good example of that! Also, sometimes you can find the cluster of articles on the topic you want, for instance by searching for a keyword, but you can’t remember based on the titles which article contained the specific snippet you’re looking for. This is incidentally why I find the browser history next to useless, because you can only search by the page title which is often completely divorced from the content. ↩