Revisiting Design Philosophy

I have written about personal design philosophy for years now. These thoughts are often repetitive and cyclical, but I apologize for nothing because a personal webpage is the cyber equivallent of cracking open someone's skull and actually being able to see all the thoughts flitting round.

A lot of these thoughts often center around how to organize or manage a blog. The blog--a catalogue of publishable thought--tends to cover a wide range of topics and ideas, and if a blog is written in with any consistency it can easily get overwhelming. Blogging platforms have adopted a lot of organizational conventions, like categories, tags, entry dates, and sidebars, and I have questioned many of these. Static Site Generators like Hugo treat these conventions as a foregone conclusion, so if you're using an SSG going outside these conventions can be a lot of work.

First question, who is the blog for? If it's a microblog for venting and close friends, organization is not needed. Dates are important, because you're charting mood. If the blog is more informational, organization is necessary, and if it's intended for outside readership the organization should be consistent.

• Despite of my intense love of the Ctrl+F microblog concept I keep returning to my One Page One Concept philosophy. Each thought deserves its own page. It isolates the thought in one place, and and you can do whatever you want to do aesthetically without impacting other pages.
• If you look at the Zettelkasten method you'll find information is broadly divided into fleeting ideas and knowledge. Fleeting information is only relevant as a reminder--usually, to look something up, go to an appointment, etc., and then it can be discarded. Knowledge is something you'll refer back to later so it must be findable. Many of my blog posts fall into the knowledge category.
  • Microblogs with many posts on one page are great for fleeting information, and one page for the entire microblog keeps maintenance low.
  • Per-page blogs are probably a better choice for knowledge, as they allow focusing on a topic and are easier to link.
• Previously, I ascribed to "best tool for the job" by keeping two different blogs, a project blog and a microblog, and ne'er the twain did meet. The project blog contains knowlege entries that are periodically updated as new information comes along. So instead of having 3 posts on a particular microcontroller, I had one page that I would update with anchorlinks/TOC. The microblog, being somewhat more fleeting, was one-and-done.

What I'm considering is having category pages rather than blog posts. Any time I want to write about Design Philosophy, I will update that page. If I ever want to see previous thoughts, they are already here, navigatable by anchor links and #tags as needed.

But again, do all thoughts need to be front-facing? The user can easily follow curated links to relevant posts, if they desire, and it keeps the page uncluttered. Ogres are like onions, and so are webpages. And I've spoken before of liking the iceberg concept of a website--the more the reader delves, the more conent is revealed.

For now, I've decided to resurrect my Hugo microblog and continue maintaining it by hand. (I also found a few posts I forgot to publish, whoops.)