/blog

Drove to the office for the first time since my wife came out of hospital. It's only been a few weeks but it shows how quickly things change this time of year. It was dark when I left ... With stars. The clocks go back at the weekend.

I was going to write something in response to the whole "blogs vs digital gardens" thing but Bix has it covered. Also see his earlier post.

I like the idea of a digital garden but the reality has never worked out for me. My own go at creating one, and the subsequent attempt to "gardenify" the blog (e.g. /start) never met my expectations – whatever they were, I don't think I ever had them properly fixed in my head.

My issue is that I'm just not organised enough to run a digital garden, just as I can't be bothered with IRL gardening once I'm done with the necessities to keep things vaguely tidy.

I wanted to gardenify the blog so that there was a better flow to things but came to realise that this either didn't work or wasn't needed. I have internal links and backlinks as well as search. Labels exist for some core topics and things can even be [[tagged]] if I want to – another feature that seemed like a good idea but has never been used.

I realised that what makes this work best is just writing without trying to make it something it isn't. No essay pieces SEO'd to within an inch of their life, no trying to be someone I'm not, just words on a page about whatever interests me.

Blogging was definitely co-opted by mainstream media, journalists and content marketers. The more traditional bloggers, however, have always been there but often harder to find – that's why I like the current uptick in blogging communities built around certain platforms like Bearblog. The more bloggers you read the more you find, and discovery seems to be increasingly exponential.