First Post
Welcome to my new blog! This is the first post. A blog in 2023 feels like an anachronism, but there are many internal and external factors that make it the right time.
Why a blog, why now?
I recently re-read the excellent book How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens, which came out in a 2nd edition last year. When I first read the book a few years ago, my mind was blown by the concept of the Zettelkasten for taking notes; it felt like a huge piece of the puzzle I had been missing for years. Back then, I set up my own Zettelkasten in an initial burst of enthusiasm. Since, however, I haven’t added to it consistently. This makes me feel a little guilty when reading books, like I’m wasting my time if I wasn’t adding notes into the slip box. I still feel like that’s the case, and I want to get back to the deeper level of thinking that comes with taking notes in the right way.
This blog is a part of my renewed effort to re-engage with my Zettelkasten. One thing I’ve I understand now is the necessity of having a final output step, such as writing, that uses your notes as input. Without using the notes, you don’t have the feedback loop that makes the whole system complete. This blog is, in part, a place to do a little writing to help me complete the loop with my Zettelkasten.
And there are other reasons for starting a blog right now that come from recent events in the broader tech world.
One is the recent happenings at Twitter. Everyone knows about the recent rapid degradation of Twitter under its new management. Twitter was always my social media platform of choice, and so this is incredibly tragic to me. Over the years, I came to respect many of the ways the teams at Twitter managed the product with noble intent. It’s been sad to see how quickly all that’s been undone. While I do hope that many of the alternatives, like Mastodon, will be successful, the whole experience reminded me of the importance of owning one’s own platform. With what we’ve seen happen, is it really wise to donate content to any proprietary platform right now?
A second development in the tech industry was the release of ChatGPT a couple months ago. While it has generated a lot of optimism about the impact that AI will have on the way people write, my reaction was the opposite. If we do go into a world where everyone relies on a tool like ChatGPT as a scaffold (or a crutch) for their writing, the people who actually know how to write well in an original, human voice will be at a fantastic advantage. I’m not there yet, but I hope that having a blog will help me develop my writing skills to prepare for the new world of an AI standardization of communication.
The path to a new blog
I’ve also taken a new approach to launch this blog.
In the past few years, I’ve had several false starts. Whenever I felt the urge to blog, I’d spend all this time trying to create one from scratch using the shiny technology du jour. This meant wasting a bunch of time learning things like NextJS, Gatsby, templating libraries, and hosted CMS systems before I got down to writing a single post. Invariably, I’d get bogged down in learning the technology and never launch.
Recently I read Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, and that taught me what I had been doing wrong. In the book, he talks about the many aspects of “Resistance,” all of the mental barriers and obstacles that come in the way of doing any kind of creative or knowledge work. It made me realize that this desire to roll my own blog every time as a form of resistance that was getting in the way.
This time, I’ve chosen the absolute minimum approach to start by using a template with the absolute minimum of customization. In this case, I’ve used Matt Jennings’ excellent SvelteKit blog template. Perhaps I’ll customize it a lot further down the line, but not until I’ve got a lot more writing under my belt!
