My blog is a digital garden, not a blog(joelhooks.com)
joelhooks.com
My blog is a digital garden, not a blog
https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden
46 comments
Not having dates is a bad idea... Even if it's just for context.
If this article was posted in 2018, things have changed a little bit since 2020...
If this article was posted in 2018, things have changed a little bit since 2020...
yeah exactly, dates may not be important in some contexts, but we're talking about information display - on the browse... area of your blog or index page -- it may be important to the reader to know when something was written/posted. i.e. I went browse to see more posts on that site and saw a post called 'Work From Home', with no date. I wanted to know if it was written ages ago or perhaps very recently when working from home became very relevant to today's coronavirus society.
Also, I think for better or worse, as internet surfers, we've come to expect things to be somewhat sorted chronologically as default, so unless you're pulling some 'highlight' articles out to feature etc, we're conditioned to expect the list/index as date sorted for the most part....
Also, I think for better or worse, as internet surfers, we've come to expect things to be somewhat sorted chronologically as default, so unless you're pulling some 'highlight' articles out to feature etc, we're conditioned to expect the list/index as date sorted for the most part....
Hey so sorry to do this but I have a question for you regarding your getting into the Georgia tech masters program without a bachelor degree my email: smithmayowa20 at gmail dot com.
> Nobody reads posts in chronological order.
No, people don't. Google however, does. Good SEO tells you to put a date based path in the URL (and in the page metadata). This helps Google work out how fresh your content is. If someone asks Google 'xyz' and you have a recent post about 'xyz' you will be ranked higher than many other 'xyz' posts.
No, people don't. Google however, does. Good SEO tells you to put a date based path in the URL (and in the page metadata). This helps Google work out how fresh your content is. If someone asks Google 'xyz' and you have a recent post about 'xyz' you will be ranked higher than many other 'xyz' posts.
You're advocating arranging my thoughts so a web crawling bot can sell more ads. Fuck Google.
This is... not how ads/webcrawling works? I'm probably about as anti-google as anyone here, but blindly chanting a mantra benefits no one.
If we think about this logically, it makes sense that putting content into formats that the webscraping bot recognizes would score better than formats that it doesn't recognize.
For what it's worth, you can also put the date in semantic html tags. [0, 1, 2] Not only is this pretty easy, it also makes the site more accessible to people who use screen readers, etc. Here is how I do it (statically generated). [3]
[0]: https://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_semantic_elements.asp
[1]: http://schema.org/Article
[2]: https://schema.org/datePublished
[3]: https://github.com/azah/personal-site-public/blob/master/pos...
If we think about this logically, it makes sense that putting content into formats that the webscraping bot recognizes would score better than formats that it doesn't recognize.
For what it's worth, you can also put the date in semantic html tags. [0, 1, 2] Not only is this pretty easy, it also makes the site more accessible to people who use screen readers, etc. Here is how I do it (statically generated). [3]
[0]: https://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_semantic_elements.asp
[1]: http://schema.org/Article
[2]: https://schema.org/datePublished
[3]: https://github.com/azah/personal-site-public/blob/master/pos...
I'm not anti-google. I'm anti-distraction. Logically, there is a best toothpaste for gardening but shopping for it won't change the number of weeds that need pulling or put more cucumbers on the vine.
Living in the imaginary world where fame and fortune come from Google search results is easier than facing the blank page.
Living in the imaginary world where fame and fortune come from Google search results is easier than facing the blank page.
That's not what SEO does.
SEO is providing the ability for your webpage to be crawled easier so it can appear in Google's searches.
If you don't want people coming to your site, then yeah, don't do it?
SEO is providing the ability for your webpage to be crawled easier so it can appear in Google's searches.
If you don't want people coming to your site, then yeah, don't do it?
SEO distracts writers from writing. It's a rabbit hole of unproductive efforts when the goal is to write. The hard part of writing is writing something good. SEO doesn't make writers write better and this piece of writing isn't here because of SEO. It's here because it is intellectually interesting and because an actual human submitted it to Hacker News and because other actual humans voted it up.
What matters is the writing not the web page. Once a writer thinks about the web page their writing suffers.
What matters is the writing not the web page. Once a writer thinks about the web page their writing suffers.
SEO is only a part of your strategy to get eyeballs in front of your text. SEA (Search Engine Advertising) and SMO (Social Media Optimization) are important (more ore less, depending on your product).
SEO is not part of my strategy at all. I try to avoid optimization whenever practical because optimization is a distraction from just getting on with the work.
Luckily, there are projects that will do it for you. But it seems like your motivation isn't to actually drive traffic to your site, but instead just to do work for the sake of doing it? I'm not sure. Avoiding "optimization whenever practical" is a very strange concept.
Well yes it’s an unusual way of looking at one’s self and the unusualness of that awareness probably makes me strange. But I am ok with that.
I write because I write. It might help to think about an analogy to growing flowers in the garden instead of cash crops like cotton, tobacco, or weed. While cash crop husbandry is interesting in and of itself what cash crops produce is cash. Of course cash is useful but it’s one of the less interesting things a person can spend their time making and thinking in terms of cash tends to make people a bit tedious to be around, well at least it makes them so for me because they’re often preoccupied with Bol Weevils and spot market prices and the cost of diesel for the truck and payroll taxes.
On the other hand, when a flower gardener looks up from their work they are likely to say something practical in general like “I’m thirsty” and occasionally something about our shared experience such as the weather. But sometimes they say something insightful because of all the time they spent not thinking about all the things one must think about because those things are part of what “growing cash crops” means when someone says it and they are not part of what “a flower garden” means.
I enjoy writing. I write because I write. I write because writing is productive. I write because writing produces interesting things.
I wrote this with my thumbs because my phone was in my hand when I read your comment. I just got on with the work. I didn’t futz with switching devices to use my Unicomp model M keyboard because doing so would have changed what I wrote by forcing me to write faster. Not actually forcing me of course but the interruption would require me to chase what I was thinking instead of thinking it. And of course the model M is an awesome weapon for arguing the internet. So awesome that the pleasure of forum combat would also change what I write. Buckling springs machine gun clicking like the old days.
So I optimize for doing this because this is what I do but that means not optimizing in the ways people mean when they say “optimization” in regard to writing on the web. It means optimizing with the premise that writing this matters and is the goal and that it was a productive day looks like. YMMV.
I write because I write. It might help to think about an analogy to growing flowers in the garden instead of cash crops like cotton, tobacco, or weed. While cash crop husbandry is interesting in and of itself what cash crops produce is cash. Of course cash is useful but it’s one of the less interesting things a person can spend their time making and thinking in terms of cash tends to make people a bit tedious to be around, well at least it makes them so for me because they’re often preoccupied with Bol Weevils and spot market prices and the cost of diesel for the truck and payroll taxes.
On the other hand, when a flower gardener looks up from their work they are likely to say something practical in general like “I’m thirsty” and occasionally something about our shared experience such as the weather. But sometimes they say something insightful because of all the time they spent not thinking about all the things one must think about because those things are part of what “growing cash crops” means when someone says it and they are not part of what “a flower garden” means.
I enjoy writing. I write because I write. I write because writing is productive. I write because writing produces interesting things.
I wrote this with my thumbs because my phone was in my hand when I read your comment. I just got on with the work. I didn’t futz with switching devices to use my Unicomp model M keyboard because doing so would have changed what I wrote by forcing me to write faster. Not actually forcing me of course but the interruption would require me to chase what I was thinking instead of thinking it. And of course the model M is an awesome weapon for arguing the internet. So awesome that the pleasure of forum combat would also change what I write. Buckling springs machine gun clicking like the old days.
So I optimize for doing this because this is what I do but that means not optimizing in the ways people mean when they say “optimization” in regard to writing on the web. It means optimizing with the premise that writing this matters and is the goal and that it was a productive day looks like. YMMV.
Does that really work? I would doubt that, without having any "SEO knowledge".
Google should know when the web page was first posted or last updated, simply by crawling.
And trusting a date in the URL just opens up the ability to game and abuse the system.
Google should know when the web page was first posted or last updated, simply by crawling.
And trusting a date in the URL just opens up the ability to game and abuse the system.
If that were really the case then everyone would make dynamic pages that always claimed to be created 6 hours ago.
In reality Google knows perfectly well when the page was created (or first seen by their spider, which is almost the same thing these days) without relying on metadata.
In reality Google knows perfectly well when the page was created (or first seen by their spider, which is almost the same thing these days) without relying on metadata.
Or Google uses the date a signal to reinforce when it's not sure and to downrank when it catches liars.
Gwern [0] also organizes his site in a similar fashion, for similar reasons. He writes for the "long now" [1] and organizes his site and his writing with people 60-70 years down the line in mind. Overall, I find gwern.net to be one of the best laid out and organized sites on the Internet.
[0]: https://gwern.net
[1]: https://www.gwern.net/About#long-site
[0]: https://gwern.net
[1]: https://www.gwern.net/About#long-site
Thank you for sharing!
"Blog" comes from "weblog" and logs usually have some time of timestamp, right?
Especially when using time-relative words like "lately", I always check out the date of the post to see how relevant this piece is.
In addition to displaying a date on the post, I also appreciate dates above the content[0].
It's fine to have a curated homepage though.
[0]: https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2019/11/dates-above/
Especially when using time-relative words like "lately", I always check out the date of the post to see how relevant this piece is.
In addition to displaying a date on the post, I also appreciate dates above the content[0].
It's fine to have a curated homepage though.
[0]: https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2019/11/dates-above/
> Seriously, who cares when anything on my site got posted.
I care, because it gives me context of how relevant it might be.
I care, because it gives me context of how relevant it might be.
Yeah, I think the author missed the mark with that line too.
Most peoples personal websites today are a series of articles, so of course dating them is reasonable, and sorting by it is also nice for the reader.
Even online manuals, which should not be organized around chronology benefit greatly by having dates on them.
We rarely see the 90's style homepages with "Here is my a list of my favourite episodes" and "This is my gallery of my favourite cats" anymore. But if you want to make your home on the web more about themes, than articles, then great.
Most peoples personal websites today are a series of articles, so of course dating them is reasonable, and sorting by it is also nice for the reader.
Even online manuals, which should not be organized around chronology benefit greatly by having dates on them.
We rarely see the 90's style homepages with "Here is my a list of my favourite episodes" and "This is my gallery of my favourite cats" anymore. But if you want to make your home on the web more about themes, than articles, then great.
Sure, it should be mentioned somewhere. But chronological order isn't necessarily the most logical order for posts on a personal site's homepage.
That's different than not having a date on the post at all.
One of the things that is of constant annoyance is trying to find out when something was posted. Sometimes the time when it was posted is important, it allows me to ascertain how relevant the information therein is.
ok so this is helpful because I'm planning on starting a blog and want to use it to document some of the cool things I've done in the past.
Would you (as a reader) prefer my trip to Norway to be dated when it happened, or when I published the article?
I am mostly wanting to blog to curate my memories of things I done or thoughts I've had but I'd be lying if I didn't also hope it might help me make 'friends' online and find people with common interests.
Would you (as a reader) prefer my trip to Norway to be dated when it happened, or when I published the article?
I am mostly wanting to blog to curate my memories of things I done or thoughts I've had but I'd be lying if I didn't also hope it might help me make 'friends' online and find people with common interests.
for something like this I would feel that the two relevant dates are when the facts happened and when the act of writing is set.
As in if you are writing about a trip in 2002 and the page is written as if you wrote it soon after the trip then the date of publishing is not really essential (in terms of semantic html I think it would still be good etiquette to have is "somewhere" on the page, like in a footer, tagged as such, same thing for a "last updated" date)
In this case I would say that is would be nice as a reader if I can understand what the date mean and if it was backdated or not.
As in if you are writing about a trip in 2002 and the page is written as if you wrote it soon after the trip then the date of publishing is not really essential (in terms of semantic html I think it would still be good etiquette to have is "somewhere" on the page, like in a footer, tagged as such, same thing for a "last updated" date)
In this case I would say that is would be nice as a reader if I can understand what the date mean and if it was backdated or not.
I think the best way to do something like that is date it when it was published, and add something like “in my trip to Norway in 2019,”
I've sort of gotten away from thinking I have a 'blog', to thinking I have a 'personal website' which features my writing on there. I think 'digital garden' is a nice little metaphor for a personal website, and that 'digital museum' is perhaps even more accurate -- a curated and aesthetically organized set of artifacts that on the whole reflect who I am and my work / life.
For the lamentation of chronological posts on here, don't see the big deal, you can tweak your website to have tag based or category based view too fairly easily; I have switched my website to have category based as the default view long ago but also offer chronological and feel quite happy with result: http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/
For the lamentation of chronological posts on here, don't see the big deal, you can tweak your website to have tag based or category based view too fairly easily; I have switched my website to have category based as the default view long ago but also offer chronological and feel quite happy with result: http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/
My blog is also like this - https://paul.copplest.one
Basically it’s a wiki of things that I stumble upon and want to learn later (mostly from HN).
It’s not so interesting for general reading, but the cheat sheets and code snippets get a lot of use from my friends in tech (and from google it seems).
I figure at the end of my life it will be a fairly complete knowledge base of everything I’ve ever learned
Basically it’s a wiki of things that I stumble upon and want to learn later (mostly from HN).
It’s not so interesting for general reading, but the cheat sheets and code snippets get a lot of use from my friends in tech (and from google it seems).
I figure at the end of my life it will be a fairly complete knowledge base of everything I’ve ever learned
I'm also revamping my website (zola->hugo) and I was debating on whether to have a chronological list, or to separate my posts into cohesive groups. Such as Programming, korean, Self, etc. See [0] for an example.
> Seriously, who cares when anything on my site got posted.
One could argue it depends what the subject matter is. If it's about a javascript framework, I do need to see that date. What I have now is a boolean I look at for each post, which controls if the date is shown in the post listings (it is always shown on the post itself).
Another argument is the date is relevant because it gives context to the discussion. Of course it would matter if a piece was written in 1829, 1929, or 1931, or even particular months in a year. Posts (and people...) don't exist in a vacuum.
[0]: https://os.phil-opp.com/
> Seriously, who cares when anything on my site got posted.
One could argue it depends what the subject matter is. If it's about a javascript framework, I do need to see that date. What I have now is a boolean I look at for each post, which controls if the date is shown in the post listings (it is always shown on the post itself).
Another argument is the date is relevant because it gives context to the discussion. Of course it would matter if a piece was written in 1829, 1929, or 1931, or even particular months in a year. Posts (and people...) don't exist in a vacuum.
[0]: https://os.phil-opp.com/
Would you mind sharing your reason(s) for moving from Zola to Hugo?
When I last looked into static site generators Zola attracted my attention so I'm curious to know what your experience with it was.
Thanks!
When I last looked into static site generators Zola attracted my attention so I'm curious to know what your experience with it was.
Thanks!
I have happily used Zola for the last ~2+ years.
I'm migrating because I wanted to use asciidoctor instead of markdown, and hugo has better support. However I have to maintain a custom fork to get custom params to the asciidoc renderer, and to support asciidoc-diagrams. As far as I'm aware Rust has no good asciidoc crate so I would have to shave the yak and write my own implementation. Yuk.
Zola and Hugo are very similar in features, except for i18n. For most people this isn't an issue, and it's being worked on for Zola.
Also, Zola is written in Rust and Hugo in Go, so one might be more comfortable extending / forking one over the other.
You can check out many Zola examples here [0] and the source code for my website here [1].
[0]: https://github.com/getzola/zola/blob/master/EXAMPLES.md
[1]: https://github.com/azah/personal-blog
I'm migrating because I wanted to use asciidoctor instead of markdown, and hugo has better support. However I have to maintain a custom fork to get custom params to the asciidoc renderer, and to support asciidoc-diagrams. As far as I'm aware Rust has no good asciidoc crate so I would have to shave the yak and write my own implementation. Yuk.
Zola and Hugo are very similar in features, except for i18n. For most people this isn't an issue, and it's being worked on for Zola.
Also, Zola is written in Rust and Hugo in Go, so one might be more comfortable extending / forking one over the other.
You can check out many Zola examples here [0] and the source code for my website here [1].
[0]: https://github.com/getzola/zola/blob/master/EXAMPLES.md
[1]: https://github.com/azah/personal-blog
I have a similar concept for my site, with no publish dates and handwritten content/styling. One difference is that I haven't been using a static site generator, which I'm on the fence about using. On one hand it sounds like a much easier way to incorporate mixed media when I create a page, but on the other it feels like needless bloat for such a simple project.
I like the word "garden" for this style of personal site, I might start using that.
I like the word "garden" for this style of personal site, I might start using that.
Note to the author: if I click the "Check it out" link near the bottom, the URL changes but nothing happens. Win10, Edge (pre-chromium I think).
Why not just use a wiki?
That is a great question... I could be off a bit here because I have looked at static site generators and blogging systems and only like 1 wiki setups (tiddly).
I get the feeling and someone else who knows more should say I am off base that static site generators/blogging systems are easier to setup/use/customize?
But yup I agree with your question, why not use a wiki... and I think the answer is interesting.
I get the feeling and someone else who knows more should say I am off base that static site generators/blogging systems are easier to setup/use/customize?
But yup I agree with your question, why not use a wiki... and I think the answer is interesting.
What would be the advantage of a wiki?
To me it only seems to have downsides: Not using my local text editor and having to worry about web security.
Why not just put some Markdown into a git repo?
To me it only seems to have downsides: Not using my local text editor and having to worry about web security.
Why not just put some Markdown into a git repo?
I use tiddlywiki's node server and markdown plugin (behind a yubikey auth setup with nginx). It means that the data is stored in markdown files in a folder (with accompanying blah.md.meta files tiddlywiki maintains) but I can still edit easily from my phone, multiple computers, etc. there's a command to load files in (get the meta files and index in place), so I was thinking about using inotify to monitor a folder to be able to slurp in files from there, but I've been happy just editing through the browser and sometimes grabbing the .md files for use elsewhere.
again, the killer thing for me is the portability. vim in a terminal is only nice when I have a keyboard; if I want to keep track of a movie a friend's recommending when I have my phone, being able to pull it up is great.
also, plugins are key. org-roam has this for org-mode, but I haven't seen anything for vim that's as smooth as the backlinks setup I have in tiddlywiki, which is something like https://giffmex.org/gifts/tiddlyblinkexample.html at the bottom of each note, autodisplaying snippets of context from other notes around links to that note. I also have it display a list of links to notes tagged with the name of that note. none of that is in the markdown files, just the view layer.
again, the killer thing for me is the portability. vim in a terminal is only nice when I have a keyboard; if I want to keep track of a movie a friend's recommending when I have my phone, being able to pull it up is great.
also, plugins are key. org-roam has this for org-mode, but I haven't seen anything for vim that's as smooth as the backlinks setup I have in tiddlywiki, which is something like https://giffmex.org/gifts/tiddlyblinkexample.html at the bottom of each note, autodisplaying snippets of context from other notes around links to that note. I also have it display a list of links to notes tagged with the name of that note. none of that is in the markdown files, just the view layer.
After seeing entire books presented in a hosted Git repo (generally Github), I am really thinking about presenting more writing this way. Things can be in any order, in any number of files. It can be a 5- or 500-page "book"/wiki.
This is how my notes have been stored for years. I have:
- A single markdown (soon ASCIIdoc) converted to a single html page with pandoc and a little css markdown - Autogenerated TOC at the top if I want to link someone to a section, which is just an anchor. I use ctrl+f for myself - It is 188K and has no pictures so it works perfectly on slow connections. 50 pages if printed to PDF
- A single markdown (soon ASCIIdoc) converted to a single html page with pandoc and a little css markdown - Autogenerated TOC at the top if I want to link someone to a section, which is just an anchor. I use ctrl+f for myself - It is 188K and has no pictures so it works perfectly on slow connections. 50 pages if printed to PDF
This is a powerful idea, week by week I read efforts from tech community for building personal information management tools. You just need to see Notion growth.
Concept of organic wikis and that web 1.0 - 90's nostalgic idea with a bit of decentralized/self hosted content is absolutely a trend
The problem is always the same when putting out a website: what's your content - your added value, who are your prospects/readers ?
Sorting by date, CTA, content strategies, etc. come after you have answered those questions. Then you can focus on how best you can make your content and your readers meet.
Sorting by date, CTA, content strategies, etc. come after you have answered those questions. Then you can focus on how best you can make your content and your readers meet.
I'd like to ask the author if he would be willing to justify the text on his "digital garden". It would make for a better reading experience in my opinion. Also, your site would benefit from grouping or ordering posts by topic.
* Nobody reads posts in chronological order. At best, they will find a post through a search engine or link and maybe glance at your homepage once. The most popular page on my site (by far) was something I wrote 3 years ago - it still gets hits but that doesn't translate into regular readers.
* Nobody really follows blogs by subscribing to feeds. OK, obviously some people do but it is small fraction of site readers. And of those that do, only a small fraction regularly visit the sites they are subscribed to.
The upshot is that you are better thinking of your blog as a set of independent articles rather than an actual Web Log. Publication dates are important to gauge how up-to-date the information is but almost no-one is going to scroll through a date-sorted index.
If you want users to browse around after they have read the first article, implement some sort of Related Articles or tagging system to arrange your content by topic.