What I expect from this blog

I do have another blog, where I write about more serious computer-science stuff. But this one is not that. However, as the now-owner of two blogs on the world wide web, I have a problem. I just don't write that much.

In the first couple years I had my blog, I don't think I've written anything on it, apart from what I plugged into it from my previous scribblings. But I changed the way it looked for a million times. This has been a topic that I've thought about to no particular avail; substance over form.

However, there is more than just substance (content) and form (styling). There is also functionality, utility. I've started thinking about how I can make this blog into a utility that will want to make me use it. Not a man-made-horror addiction-algorithm-generator, but instead something that I will take joy in using, and something that brings everything together on my online life and fills the gaps between what I use to make the web a social place, as well as a knowledge base.

What my personal blog looked like in the past.

So what do I expect from this blog? And how do I mean to use it?

Remembering

I'll be honest, my memory isn't the best. And I did not have a good attention span even before doomscrolling became a thing. It had always been a problem for me and walking into a room and forgetting why I am there has been the rule rather than the exception.

I recently came to the realization that I just can not stick anything into my brain anymore without constant repetition or extreme interest. Even things I am interested in have a hard time standing against the storms that reap my mind at night.

So I expect this blog to become a place where I can create indices. Indices of things I like. Indices of experiences I had, interesting concepts I've come across, reading material, people to follow etc.

Why make these into a blog rather than a notion page? Because (1) I love the possibility of others being able to benefit from my experiences, (2) I want to create my own sphere of social web, fully managed by me, rather than using a third-party medium. (3) I can be free to change said medium to bend it into what I wish to do with it. I don't want to work with tools that have constraints, paywalls, premium features, when I take immense joy from creating the medium itself myself, however shabby or uncomparable in usability.

Creating

Codelets

I'm a huge nerd. I like nerding out writing new functionality for my websites. I write my own open-source blogging framework (this site runs on it: simplymarkdown). I write my own RSS reader (rss-reader.dutl.uk). I want my corner of the web to be a place where I can experiment with wrapping the content around some extra ~logic~ magic to get a serotonin hit from creating something new.

Literature

I want to write more. Not just informative blog posts or rants; but stories, poems. Maybe get into world-building while I'm at it. Conlangs, I've had a few. I've only ever written a handful stories and not more than 50 poems. But what better thing to do on a blog, than to create more of it?

Although I don't have the time to do all this as I did in the past, I can hope to document them better and have a way to look back into what I've done with my time when I didn't have to give all of it up for profit.

Documenting

I have a lot of side projects that take me from anywhere between 30 minutes to a few days. And I don't really do anything with them. Frankly, not all of them are interesting. But I would say they are worth documenting. Even if they weren't successful. I've learnt early on in life that documenting how to be unsuccessful at a task is just as important as documenting how to be successful at it.

Connecting

And lastly, I wish to connect with people that I share interests with. Following their blogs, where the stream of their mind runs more clearly than tweets or toots. And see what they have to say in their own little corner of the web. What they are passionate about and think about enough that they want to share all their thinking with the world. And I'd be giving anyone who's interested a window into mine.