Excursions

The recent discussions around social media platforms tire me. BlueSky. Threads. Mastodon. And whatnot. They are all the same. Trying to cash in on the lost interest in Twitter. To be similar to Twitter, yet distinct at the same time. I see people try these different services and get impressed. Their interest fades away after pounding the timelines with posts. This has happened to me with all the above services.

The network effect that Twitter managed 15 years back won’t be recreated. Twitter was a lone service. Fifteen years ago was a different time.

When I joined Twitter, I cared zilch about how I should use it. Or how I shouldn’t. That was a different me then. Now, I think a lot about how and how much I should use social networks.

I hold myself back out of fear. Fear of uncertainty. Fear of complexity. Fear of promises.

The fear won’t let me get hooked to any social networks anymore. Syndicating posts from my blog is not going to do that either.

I had forgotten that I had purchased iA Writer and had the app installed on my Mac. So odd that I missed this. Anyway, with my plan to shut down Scribe, I am back to writing with iA Writer.

I believe Ulysses’ overall better experience, both writing and publishing, attracted me to the app. I subconsciously moved away from iA Writer, never to return. Time to change that. iA Writer was the first writing app that I fell in love with. It’s no surprise, then, that it continues to impress.

While working on my blog’s recent redesign, I decided not to display the date/time as part of the post. Sure, I am not the only one who does that.

Although debatable, I find that detail useless for my type of writing, and I was ridding the interface of every element that wasn’t essential. I don’t write posts which are relevant only to a particular period. I am not writing news articles that will go stale. Plus, if there’s an article that forms the context for a post, I explicitly link to that.

So why does it matter when the words are written? I stand by and am even proud of every post I have written. Short or long. On the contrary, I don’t want the age of the post to impact what it says. It’s still me saying that. Just younger. It is the same reason I don’t correct my old posts.

I have also seen people put a disclaimer on old posts saying it may not reflect one’s current views. Colin puts such a disclaimer on his older posts and writes.

Just because I may not think a certain way, however, doesn’t mean that I can’t be proud of what I have previously written — some of it is among my best writing.

I agree with Colin. But for the same reason, I don’t want to put any such disclaimer. Isn’t it obvious that one’s perspective towards things changes over time? Why call it out, then?

I accept that not showing the date is extreme. After all, I still include the date in the source and RSS feeds. But removing a detail is the best way to determine if it is essential. And currently, I am all for a reset.

A few months back, I responded to Om Malik’s thoughts on the importance of stream of posts on one’s blog. Here’s what I proposed we bloggers should do.

Recommend stuff to the reader on our platform, our blogs. On our home pages. And around our posts. But instead of letting AI decide, let’s curate these recommendations manually.

I have since wanted to update my website, my primary home on the web, to do away with the standard design principle for a blog. Why does every home page have to look a certain way? Pages after pages of reverse chronological lists of posts.

I recently quipped that blogs have made the web boring. That every blog looks the same. All themes are more or less the same. A slight layout change here. A margin or padding there. Varied columns. But all look the same to me. You know that you are reading a blog.

I wanted to stop doing that. I want to curate the experience for the readers. Worst case, for the one reader that’s me. So, I have been working on laying out the structure for this space afresh¹.

A home page recommends a selection of posts. No page’s a reverse chronological list. Even if a reader visits one that’s supposed to be, for example, archive, they won’t see a list. Every page allows a search and an option to visit a random post. A prominent nav bar allows navigation around every post. There are a lot of other minor touches sprinkled across.

Plus there are colours. Minimal doesn’t mean black and white. Minimal can have personality. It does now.

Satisfied after playing around and iterating with the changes for a couple of days, I applied the layout to the site today. Once I did, I wondered if this space was a typical blog any more. As per Wikipedia.

A blog is an informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page.

Not a diary. No reverse chronological order. And yet I don’t care. To me, a blog is what a blogger wants it to be. And I am done with the stream of posts. So here’s to a bold new start.

I sometimes hate how I read stuff online – hopping from link to link. Reading, but not letting it absorb within. To not pause and think. That’s not the way I like to do it. If what I read doesn’t make me agree, disagree or learn something new, it’s futile.

Seth Godin reminded me today that “no one cares about the noise in our head (or the actions we take) nearly as much as we do”. That noise kept me wary of changing a few things with my setup till today. I pulled the plug and have changed how and where I write. Thanks, Seth!

I wish every theme on Micro.blog got its own test blog under the account of the author of the theme. That way, a demo site is always available to try the theme out before applying. Thoughts @manton?

My writing has changed a lot over the years. I read a post from 14 years ago, and it reads.. carefree. In a good way.

When I write something these days, I replace every “you should..” with “I am..”. If what I wrote doesn’t hold true, I don’t publish.

While responding to an observation from Ben Werdmuller, Om Malik asks, “Is reverse chronological ‘stream’ still a valid design principle?” I believe the answer is complicated.

As with most folks commenting on Om’s blog, I have been a follower of his writings for a long time. And also been a blogger since updating one’s blog, and visiting others to look for inspiration was a multiple-times-a-day activity. It still matters for all of us who have consumed the stream of blog posts. Or at least we understand it.

I generally follow blogs through RSS, where a stream is meaningless. But I would still follow a linked post to a new blogger that I don’t know about. I then browse through the stream of posts to see if the blogger’s topic and writing interest me. If it does, I subscribe to his RSS. So the stream is important for me for discoverability.

But the people who haven’t ever consumed such a stream of blog posts may not find it helpful. The algorithm has spoilt us with the “recommendations” – the links to the other stuff on the platform.

So we as bloggers should serve the same. Recommend stuff to the reader on our platform, our blogs. On our home pages. And around our posts. But instead of letting AI decide, let’s curate these recommendations manually. We have all the tools that we need. Tags/Categories. Let’s add a few layers if required.

I have already started doing this with my blog. I have modified my home page to take readers to specific sections of the blog. I have separated posts prominently. I want to introduce a few more sections on blog and around posts. This is all still a work in progress, though.

Another tangential thought. We have stripped our blogs of all the fun in our quest to get minimal. Do you remember the tag/word clouds? Posts by date? By category? Or most commented? Let’s bring them all back. We had more than one way of presenting our blogs to the readers. Why did we stop that?