Wow, my first post of the year. Crazy how time flies.
Four years ago I wrote my first post on my new blog - How long is a blog supposed to last?. I won’t retread that same ground of musing over the life span of a blog, but it does lead me to a new thought experiment: When does a new blog begin?
This post carries a complete revamp of the style, and a completely new framework (Moving from Hugo to Astro). The domain is the same, and I have carried over my old posts into this one (which is actually a first for me! I typically abandon all old posts on framework changes).
So is this a new blog, or am I just returning to the old one? This is assuredly the modern day Ship of Theseus, an interesting yet maybe largely pointless thought exercise.
I’ve been a bit indecisive over how to use my personal website these past few years- not exactly sure what I want to do with my little space of the internet. My digital garden sits somewhere between public self learning and personal reflections over mostly work or productivity or other such endeavors. There has been two major arcs of my online blogging - Personal and then Professional. Long gone are my days of personal blogging online, the days of LiveJournal, Xanga, and even Tumblr. Somewhere around college I had the idea of having a more professional website, something to show my interest in web development and a hopeful landing site for recruiters to scrape my resume.
I don’t think I’m particularly interested in either anymore.
As I get older and life grows more full, I find myself not having the motivation to sit down and write a piece I wish to throw into the void. I do still write quite often, scribbling ideas and journaling in my very offline Obsidian Vault. Since I am writing to no one in particular, not trying to grow myself as some sort of internet brand, not interested in SEO, it seems to make more sense these days to just write locally. No pressure to edit or polish an idea into a coherent piece, just the pure unbridled freedom of a blank page. And I write all kinds of things. Short stories. Personal thoughts. Devlogs.
So I suppose that leads to the obvious question of - Why write a blog online at all? What is the point of even squatting on the marcussnow.dev domain if I prefer to keep my thoughts to myself?
I have finally decided on a few firm directions I want to take my site:
- It should look and feel personal. My old designs are all somewhat soulless, my website was indistinguishable from the dozens of other flat blogs one might find on the internet. If you can crawl around this site and get a sense of “ah I know what kinda dude this dude is”, then I’ve accomplished my goal.
- It is a collection of my work. Despite my Emily Dickinson like approach to creating, there are the rare things I would like to share. This is what I want this place to be.
- Fun! I want my site to be fun. I think a lot of the friction I have when posting is that I feel like if it’s going online, then it needs a certain level of polish. Things like eradicating typos, correcting voice, adding more for clarity, so on and so forth. This is not the fun part of writing to me. It is necessary, and an important skill to keep sharp surely, but it is not fun. I am going to give myself permission to have typos, to have some less-than-clear ideas, and to be able to post things I don’t think are perfect. Hell, in this world of AI, there might even be a certain charm to reading clearly human ramblings.
I’ve given a lot of thought about returning to Medium or getting started on Substack, but my interest in anything approaching social media has always been waning at best. So I don’t think those thoughts will ever really materialize into something.