what I want (building) this blog to feel like
Over the past month, I've looked at quite a lot of blogs. Each one is a bit different. Of course, the design and the contents differ, but what I'm most interested in is the structure. Most follow the "time stream" format, with the posts arranged in reverse chronological order, plus some individual pages (home, about, now, blogroll...). So far, I've been following the same structure. After all, it's the "default" that Bear comes with, and the default blogging setup in general.
However, there are some people out there that get creative with their setups, and I really like it whenever I find a unique one. Below are just some examples from the ones I've found so far...
- The Folkmoss Logs follows the concept of a "living web book"
- A parenthetical departure looks like an abstraction of some kind of retro filing system
- Commenting On. is described by the author as a "digital garage"
Aside from these, there's also the concept of the digital garden. I first encountered it last year (via Bear Blog) and have been fascinated by it ever since. One thing all these setups have in common is that they de-emphasize the reverse chronological order of the traditional blog format and feel / act more like a website. To be honest, these blogs can be confusing to navigate sometimes ... but then again, what's wrong with some idiosyncracy? They're personal blogs, after all. They don't have to be efficient content delivery machines.
So that brought me to the question: What do I want my blog to feel like? How do I want to build it?
Finding a basic concept
One of my favourite articles that I've read on this topic so far is Laurel Schwulst's "My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?" (LINK). Indeed, a house is a fitting metaphor. Just like when building a house, when building a personal blog, you follow certain conventions. You want it to be presentable to a degree, and you want friends to be comfortable there. But first and foremost, it's your home - you're building it for yourself, not for others. So your own taste and interests dictate its overall look and layout. Also, just like different rooms in a house, different pages or sections of a blog can have different purposes: A formal reception room (a page for "proper", essay-like writing), a comfy living room (a page for more casual writings), a quiet library (the blog archive), an attic (section for old and/or random stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else). The analogy works quite well.1
But why just stop at just a house? I also really like the image of a blog as a garden - and if I'm already including the outside, then I might as well add more stuff around it. Yes, I think that is what I want to do: Think of my blog like a landscape (maybe centered around a house with a garden). My blog is going to be a small section of my mental geography, where I gather, reflect on, raise, present, and organize my thoughts.
Building it out
So I have a concept, nice. What really matters, though, is how I implement it. It's not going to be done in one day, not even a week or a month. It's going to be a slow transformation. Below, I'll list some ideas that I can come back or add to later.
- Make different pages / sections for different parts of the landscape (or house, or garden)
- Draw a literal map for the landscape and give it its own page
- Add different styling for different pages / landscape parts
- Create drawings or paintings for different parts of the landscape
- Interconnect pages so that others can "walk through" the landscape
- (for the garden) Create indicators for how much different posts / pages have "grown"
- Create some worldbuilding for the landscape, parallel to (or on a meta-level above) the actual content of the pages and posts
Of course, there are some limitations. A full execution of this concept would probably require a personal website, where I can just build whatever I want from scratch. In some cases, I'll have to leave things a bit more abstract or do some work-arounds. But that's fine. The personal website is another project that I want to tackle at some point in the future, but I'm not ready for it yet. The blog can be a "testing ground."2 It offers a basic foundation that I can work with; it makes it easier to start.
This is where I end ... for now. One of the biggest changes, conceptually, will be treating posts (at least a higher percentage of them) more like pages, blurring the lines between the two. I'm going to add a section below where I can add more things later. Who knows what this post will once turn into?
Additions
[nothing yet]