Still a blog

In my previous article I pointed out shortcomings of the blog as an organising principle for structured information. I suppose it may have come across as if I was rejecting the blog format outright. Maybe even as if I felt above writing a blog.

Of course that would be silly of me. Let me be clearer.

First, I’m obviously writing blog articles now. This format, leading with ‘in my previous article …’, expanding on ideas formulated there, is very much like a blog. And it’s very appropriate for the state of my thinking right now. I have a vision, but the details are still fuzzy. I’m continuing on where I left off, and even revising my thinking, from one article to the next.

Blogging is a great medium for gaining momentum, without building up too much friction. It’s therapeutic, it feels good to get something out there. I feel that too, and I certainly don’t feel it’s beneath me. Neither do I exclude writing this kind of articles on a regular basis.

What I was writing about was something different. That brings me to the second point: perhaps what I envision isn’t really a good idea. It’s something that’s hard to describe, so I’ll start with a thought experiment.

Newsletters as release notes

I subscribe to Kevin Powell’s newsletter, which is published consistently once a week. Most of the newsletter consists of news on what Kevin has done that week. It might be a one-off event like joining someone else’s livestream. But often, it relates to a longer arc of his activity. Often he provides some context, some history for what he’s working on. He embeds it in the community by linking to what others are making and writing.

So it has a personal, connecting feel.

And it’s giving a sense of the development of Kevin Powell’s oeuvre.

Now imagine if that oeuvre was a more structured corpus being built up over time. Imagine if I were writing something as big and comprehensive as the Mozilla Developer Network documentation, and the newsletters or RSS feed showed not just the latest article added but the development of sections, maybe progress on the roadmap, drafts turning into completed articles.

And now imagine that the newslettery updates were a bit more granular. Perhaps you can choose between different feeds for different topics. And perhaps you could choose between different types of updates you want to be notified of. For example:

• only show new articles in a topic, or
• also show major revisions such as a new section added, or
• also show minor textual edits.

Progressive enhancement of the reading experience

Wow, I cringed as I typed that title because it sounds so much like technologizing the human experience of reading. And that kind of makes my point already. I wonder if making such a sophisticated system would alienate the reader from the experience. And maybe the writer too. Maybe the ‘killer feature’ of a blog is the human factor. A book should be a highly edited, well-structured whole with an index at the back; but a blog should be the minimally edited in-the-moment writing. If the author wants to present the contents of the blog in a more structured way, they can do the editing in private and just publish the finished product.

And yet, then we come back to my point in the previous article: what about when someone also writes ten thousand word articles on their blog, with lots of information and nuance and references? Wouldn’t it be great if there was a more structured, curated way to get to those articles?

I guess the idea of ‘progressive enhancement’ is a kind of sanity-check rule for myself. If I want to experiment with this kind of publishing, it should be an opt-in, advanced feature-set, subtle and out of the way. The basic experience of reading on this website should be natural and not require any advanced interactions. Any ‘apparatus’ added on top should be carefully considered and tested. ¹

And I’ll end with one more rule for myself, which might reassure anyone who got this far but is starting to roll their eyes. Meta-writing and navel-gazing is not the purpose of this blog. I might write a lot about writing, since I’m interested in this topic, but it must not be the only or main topic. There are other things I want to write about, and at the end of the day it’s about communicating information.

So, the next two posts will be some pictures. Of trees and sky, and of aubergines frying, to be precise.