# I wanted to share what I wrote in this morning's pages:
Now I start each day with a blank page, both physically and digitally. A clean slate, an opportunity to begin again, to shape each day as I see fit. This lockdown means that things lose their definition, everything kind of blends into everything else. The challenge is in making each day unique, in trying to mark the passage of time somehow, to give each day a shape and a sense of identity. It's hard. The morning pages are specific to that day, unique; even if I might write about similar things they are never the same. The blog is also "of the moment", divided into days by design. Daily activities may be limited but I can try to shape each day with words, give it a purpose and character. I think writing has become more important than ever, as an escape, as a way to understand myself and my thoughts, as a way to communicate that to others. Our opportunities to meet and talk have been removed so we must remake our connections digitally. For some than means social media or video apps, for me it means sharing words and thoughts, their passage from mind to page to screen. It's not much in the grand scheme of things but it's something I can do every day, something I can control and that's all any of us want at the moment: just to feel like we have something that is within our power to influence seeing as so much is currently denied to us.
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# If you're reading this then the update to WordPress 5.4 was successful. Updates are always a little nerve-wracking when so much of your site is hand coded and held together with chewing gum and sticky tape. You're never entirely sure that it's going to load up or work properly afterwards.
Still, everything keeps going, feeds get built and mails sent so I suppose I'm being a little hard on myself. That's just how it feels.
For some time, and especially since the introduction of the new editor in WordPress 5, I've seen the paths that I and the CMS are on diverge considerably. While I may have completely changed how the blog operates, and added all sorts of tweaks and features, my overarching goal is to make things simpler, cleaner, to strip it back so that there is less to distract from the words.
WordPress itself, on the other hand, is increasingly about being more and better. There are ever more options and ways to present your posts, more blocks to include and manage media, new APIs to tweak all sorts of things. It's easy to see how WordPress is so many things to so many people and why it makes up so much of the web.
I don't want or need any of that. In fact, you might wonder why I still use WordPress rather than going for something simpler. The main reason is familiarity; while I may not be a dev and there's a lot of stuff I don't know I know enough PHP and my way around WordPress to get it to do most of what I want.
I could switch to another type of blogging system, something more in tune with my desired aesthetics, maybe a static site builder, but it would take me way too long to learn enough. I feel that I would be compromising the way I want to blog, the way I want things to work, for the sake of moving.
Yes, WordPress is way too complex for my needs but I'm not sure the trade offs would be worth it.
@colinwalker I enjoy reading your morning pages.
@khurtwilliams Thanks Khürt ?
Jay's comment on yesterday's post about the blog's design got me thinking again about what a blog actually is. He remarked that how you think about a blog is, at least partly, determined by if you see it as an archive or just "thoughts right now" and this goes back to my previous musings about ephemerality: the daily blank slate, as inspired by Dave Winer and Drew Coffman. Is a blog a place to check in on someone at any given point or is it an historical record? My blog is still both but currently favours the former because it defaults to the Daily view without direct links to previous days or the archive. Definitions are, or should be, largely irrelevant now; a blog is whatever you make it, in my opinion, and I've moved so far from what tradition would call a blog. Still, the notion of it being either an archive or "of the moment" is really interesting. I've written before how my changes in focus over the years have meant that older posts no longer reflect who I am as a blogger or as a person. The shift from largely thematic to a mostly personal site made much of the pre-2016 blog irrelevant if you were using it to gain an understanding of who I am. In that respect there is mixed feeling about, and mixed value of, the archive. Even since 2016 I am unsure as to the value of much of what has been written and, let's face it, who actually goes back and reads all the old stuff? I will link to various posts and be self-referential to display a train of thought over time (I could pepper this whole post with links) but most of it can be ignored and is forgotten. I think a personal blog is like a relationship, a "getting to know you" over time experience. As Jay mentioned in his comment:
When we meet people we don't go back through their history to decide if we want to be friends based on everything that's happened before. We jump in at the "here and now" and take a chance, picking stuff up as we go along. As we get to know each other more detail will be filled in as things get shared, we start to build up a picture but it is a gradual process. I now see a blog as the same. Old posts are like memories, stories we may recount to new friends when circumstance demands their telling. We grow together. I agonised for days over what to put on my "required reading" page but is one really necessary? Do visitors need a potted history or are they, just like in a relationship, going to start from "here" and take a chance. If it doesn't work out we just go our separate ways. We are social animals and it's nice to share, nice to have touch points with others. A blog is a touch point, a way of letting people know what's been happening, what we're thinking or feeling, but it is as much for the author (if not more) as the audience. Blogs used to be very specific things, there were rules and requirements for something to be so named. Things and times change; social networks forever altered everything we knew about connecting online and it is only natural for blogs to alter as well. Blogs are not set in stone, beholden to ideas from 20 years ago, they can and should adapt to the current zeitgeist and beyond, be disruptive rather than conformist. Blogs should be as individual as the person writing them - their appearance and how they work as well as the content.