Label - Architecture

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In his post What is a blogchain? Horst Gutmann posits that:

" ... making a post part of a chain is an explicit action ... But what would happen, if we don't do that explicit step? This would also allow us to not only have a single parent-child path but one involving multiple parents, just as multiple thoughts can come together to form a new one."

He writes about creating a blog-graph rather than a blog-chain. It took me back to the idea of pathways and journeys through the blog.

Some kind of visual presentation of threads, especially in a social context, has been on my mind since the Google+ days – a means of depicting the spread of a conversation and the conversation itself in a graph-like manner. Horst's thinking translates this to the ongoing conversation with yourself AKA the blog.

It's someting I was already considering in some form so as to aid with those pathways and journeys, although not quite so elegantly.

The complexity a full map would require is currently beyond me but I can implement the first steps. I wondered, "what would it look like if my 'Start Here' page showed onward links from the posts it displays?" Now, the links are all available within the full post text but would if be useful to pull them out into a simple list for quick reference? So that's what I've been working on.

It's not amazingly pretty (I'm iterating the design) but it helps to add a bit of structure to things. Is this the best place to do it? It's as good as any. Does it do what I set out to achieve? At a (very) basic level, it provides the beginnings of a path (two levels deep now) – somewhere to start exploring things in a couple of different ways.

Good progress has been made on post labels, I can now add, remove and amend labels when writing a new post or editing an existing one.

These labels then link to the separate page which gathers all posts together from that label.

What I now need to do is work out how to best present the information on that page. Will it just be a stream of items or do I create some form of card-based look? To avoid clogging the page up with long posts do I have them present snippets if over a certain length which are then expendable?

Still, as I wrote yesterday, the structure and presentation is only part of the problem; a lot of where I want to get to relies on the mindset around posting, the willingness to be a lot more flexible with what is posted and in what condition.

All this means that the site will no longer be just a blog but also a repository for thoughts, ideas, notes, quotes, links - essentially anything that might be dumped into a PKM tool. ¹

There are further implications, such as what gets put into the RSS feed. Do I leave it unfiltered or have an element of control over what is included? What about different versions of the feed with more or less items? I already have two versions of the main feed (and the daily feed on top of that.)

Personal Knowledge Management ↩

Blog design and architecture

I mentioned that I wanted to make some major changes to the blog and how things operate, but what's triggered this?

Alan Jacobs wrote about architectural blogging:

"I have come to think that there is something architectural about writing a blog, or can be – but not in the sense of a typical architectural project, which is designed in advanced and built to specifications."

The idea is that building a personal site is very much like an open-ended architectural project, you add something here, redesign there and, eventually, "you get something big and with a discernible shape."

That shape cannot possibly be predetermined, this type of building and growth is totally organic, its direction unknowable in advance.

Tom Critchlow picked this up and ran with it saying "there's something brewing here - something about building a digital homestead, building it in a way that reflects your soul."

The real lightbulb moment for me was Tom asking:

"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?"

It got me questioning how and why I do what I do here. To what end is it created and presented? Where are the pathways and journeys? Beyond going 'day-to-day' how does anyone find their way around? Do I leave a trail of breadcrumbs to follow? Why not?

There has to be more to blogging than just turning up each day and doing your thing.

I've been trying to build something like a fully functional home on the web but it is largely a piecemeal undertaking. Isolated thought worms may prepare the soil but they don't grow the garden. Speaking of which, the Garden is grossly underutilised (as I've said before) and, with the new Notes feature, often duplicitous.

So, what to do?

I've always sald I wanted to create something of meaning and thought the "It's Only Words" project was that thing. Now I realise that the larger body of work, the story of a life (or at least part of one) is what I really aspire to. But stories need narrative and flow, a sense of cohesion and coherence.

How do I go from here to there? How do I set out on a meaningful journey? How do I map out the lay of the land, rebuild and restructure?

I've had some ideas.

I'm thinking about scraping the Garden completely and folding it into the blog. Not so much organising things by pages but, perhaps, utilising a version of labels as currently employed by Notes.

I want things to be a lot more fluid, less structured and more "thinking in public." Snippets that would normally live in the Garden will become posts but not in a traditional sense – it will increase the emphasis on viewing the day as a conglomerate rather than a series of individual items.

Using labels in this context will not be in the traditional vein of tags or categories, more an indication of threads, collections of thoughts or blogchains.

This is part technology change part mindset shift, something that I want to achieve with as little clutter as possible – visually and mentally. I see it as the next logical evolution of what I'm trying to build. while the day-to-day blog will be largely unaffected, the possibility for creating pathways and journeys is introduced.

It's going to be a lot of work (although some of can luckily be ported from elsewhere) and things will get broken so bear with me. But I'm hoping it will be well worth it in the long run.