In the post How often should you blog? by Paulo Alves they say:

However much you want. It’s your site, your house, your garden. Pick your metaphor. Unless you require the approval of third parties to continue to write on the Internet1, do what feels right. Write the occasional deep dive. Write multiple short posts per day. Go decades without posting.

I appreciate this invitation, and have also appreciated different writing in different places that considers different metaphorical foundations for a website.

I’m still not totally settled, but right now I’m most drawn to the metaphor of “notebooks” by Laurel Schwulst.

The idea of trying to come up with a taxonomical structure that could hold anything and everything, or adhering to a singular “personal brand” sounds tiring, but having everything all together also seems a bit unwieldy. I appreciate that different notebooks can be specific but also not contained to a particular genre, they could be arbitrary or poetic.

Post-Content ASMR, a collection of css experiments, was one of the first notebook-like websites I made.

For this website, I ended up adding an optional field called “index” on posts, that if set to “true” causes them to appear on the index page. In this way I view the “index” page sort of like the highlights, or writing that I still like and someone could stumble across. For things that didn’t make the index page, it also felt sort of harsh to delete them from the internet entirely, and so instead I put them into “notebooks” on the archive page. This seemed like a happy middle-ground, where old things can still exist, contained within a particular context, but don’t need to be front and center.

When I switched this website to use hugo, I also changed some css and the way that dates were formatted. I imagined somewhat imitating the dewey decimal system, and sort of enjoyed having a highly formalized and consistent format for different types of writing that could be wildly different.