I'm not the only one rethinking how their site should operate. Amit has reworked his main site so that it's no longer a blog in the true sense of the word. See his thoughts here.
He curates a selection of posts on the homepage, gives search and random links and doesn't have a chronological view anywhere. He writes:
I recently quipped that blogs have made the web boring. That every blog looks the same. All themes are more or less the same. A slight layout change here. A margin or padding there. Varied columns. But all look the same to me. You know that you are reading a blog.
That's why I am looking to do something different.
He does, of course, appreciate the irony in also posting to a regular blog (as well as his instance of hyblog for notes) but a purely curated presentation is an interesting approach.
There are an increasing number of folks trying some form of digital garden as their 'blog' – rough, unfinished thoughts that can be edited and updated instead of the more usual completed posts. It's as valid an approach as any.
As Amit says: "a blog is what a blogger wants it to be" and I believe that more people should try to redefine what that means to them. The biggest barrier to this is the platforms themselves – blogging software conforms to expected norms of the genre so the only way round it is to use something else (like a wiki) or write your own. Most haven't got the time or inclination to do either.
Personal sites need personality. They need to reflect their author, but it's harder than you imagine to do something truly different.
