- Unsupervised Learning
- Posts
- Changing my Approach to Blogging
Changing my Approach to Blogging
I think I’m about to change a great deal about how I manage this site’s content.
In the past I’ve used the site for basically everything—bookmarking things, making random comments, clipping videos and images, etc.
I liked this approach because it felt natural and like it was an extension of my personality. But I think I’m about to end that. And I’m about to go back and clean all that content out of the site as well.
My new approach will be to provide something substantive in every entry. A coherent thought. A decent comment on a given event or development. Something.
The idea is that I want to be able to click on any given post that I’ve ever made and feel like it provides some sort of insight or value, which I have produced, even after many years.
It doesn’t mean everything has to be good. It doesn’t mean everything has to be perfectly thought out and well-groomed. It just means that it has to be able to stand on its own and come from me and not from somewhere else.
Here are the criteria I’m thinking of:
Be my own. I don’t mind quoting others or linking to various things. That’s what the web is about. But that link or quote needs to start my contribution, not end it.
Timelessness. The content should be rather evergreen. Not perfectly so, but definitely not endless comments on candidate X or product Y when they’ll be obsolete in two years.
A contribution of at least 2-3 paragraphs, i.e. not just a little quip. It needs to be a self-contained idea to some degree.
I think that’s about it.
This could end up taking my complete listing of posts (once I complete the cleanup) from nearly 6,000 to around 3,000 (or even far less). But I will be quite happy knowing that anything on the site has some sort of value.
I can’t say that right now.
Curious to hear if anyone has any comment. Not just about this site, but about this approach to doing a personal site in general.