💬 Building a Digital Homestead, Bit by Brick
From these meditations on the architecture of blogging three questions emerge:
- How do you create pathways (and desire paths?) through your site? How do people start, journey, get lost and ultimately find their way through your site? I recently added a “start here” section to my writing page but I’ve been tinkering with blogchains and series of writing. What other structures emerge?
- How to archive, index and search? I recently re-architected how search works on my site. It’s not finished yet but I hope to use search as a way to search not only my site but all kinds of other stuff: my bookmarks, my wiki, my notes, my tweets even. Search can be a way to go down rabbitholes. Inspiration: Building Monocle, a universal personal search engine for life.
- Using a combination of static site and tachyons.css I find it extremely easy to iterate my way forward. Tinkering with my blog is possible piecemeal, there are no databases, no monolithic CSS files, very few dependencies.. It’s clunky at times but I have this sense that every time I build I don’t accumulate tech debt and that’s actually remarkably powerful for a site that’s been running for a decade or so…
Thinking about my blog as a ‘homestead’, I feel like it is one of those houses that has progressively been tacked onto over time. An extension here, a renovation there. It does not always make sense on the outside, but it makes sense to me.
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