¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Simon Willison’s “My approach to running a link blog”:

— I always include the names of the people who created the content I am linking to, if I can figure that out. Credit is really important, and it’s also useful for myself because I can later search for someone’s name and find other interesting things they have created that I linked to in the past. If I’ve linked to someone’s work three or more times I also try to notice and upgrade them to a dedicated tag.

— I always include the names of the people who created the content I am linking to, if I can figure that out. Credit is really important, and it’s also useful for myself because I can later search for someone’s name and find other interesting things they have created that I linked to in the past. If I’ve linked to someone’s work three or more times I also try to notice and upgrade them to a dedicated tag.

— A slightly self-involved concern I have is that I like to prove that I’ve read it. This is more for me than for anyone else: I don’t like to recommend something if I’ve not read that thing myself, and sticking in a detail that shows I read past the first paragraph helps keep me honest about that.

— I try to add something extra. My goal with any link blog post is that if you read both my post and the source material you’ll have an enhanced experience over if you read just the source material itself.

John Gruber:

Every step of the way, I found myself nodding my head, thinking to myself, I do that too! — right down to creating tags for people after I’ve mentioned their work or simply credited their bylines a few times. (The difference is that Willison seemingly isn’t a procrastinator, and I am, so my decades of tagging aren’t yet exposed to anyone but me.)

Such a great philosophy to foster the IndieWeb in a positive way.

As I’ve been slowly shaping up the workflow of my own blog, this is the kind of post I appreciate to read and learn insights from.

Personally I think that running a link blog is exhausting: there are just soooo many links, and they are a never-ending spiral.

On the other hand, choosing to blog instead of, say, tweet, adds a certain degree of friction in such a way that you tend to implicitly cherry-pick the links that are more relevant and/or important to you, given the opportunity cost.

I like that.

The point of that article was to emphasize that blogging doesn’t have to be about unique insights. The value is in writing frequently and having something to show for it over time—worthwhile even if you don’t attract much of an audience (or any audience at all).

In that article I proposed two categories of content that are low stakes and high value: things I learned and descriptions of my projects.

I definitely agree that “TIL Blogs” (“today I learned”) are very low stakes and high value, thus I’ve been trying to get into the habit of doing so to follow suit.

Describing your own projects is also a great way to keep them flowing and keep yourself motivated.

That said, I am not a fan of “link blogs”, merely because the web has an almost infinite number of links: it’s a very deep rabbit hole to fall into. Archiving links in my second brain app is almost as good.