The “webcraft” page from which this post is excerpted is part of a different approach I’ve decided to take toward building my website. Rather than just writing blog posts, I want to create big pages for given topics whose contents I refine and improve over time. I could call this a digital garden or commonplace book, but since I already call myself a “full-stack thaumaturge” I think calling this a “grimoire” is rather more fitting.
Such an approach would let me more easily do the following:
- provide a reference for my preferred radio stations and album collection on a single page
- compile notes and reactions from my reading on a single page
- create an alternative to browser bookmarks
- create a page to document my GNU Emacs configuration without using Org Mode
- document all of the shell scripts and other code I use to build this website
One could argue that a blog is is the online equivalent of a commonplace. Most recently (to my knowledge) Mike Grindle did just that in Blogs as Modern Commonplace Books in January 2024. However, as I remarked in an upcoming interview with Manuel Moreale for People and Blogs, I find that once I have written a blog post I do not always revisit and update it. I have occasionally done this, but I am not consistent about it.
Nor do I mean to stop blogging altogether. However, I think my blog might better serve as a place for excerpts from my grimoire, or for serializing fiction once I start writing it again. Or I might let my blog die out, since the likes of Google and OpenAI seem to prefer blogs for SEO and as sources of easily digestible training material for LLMs. Perhaps my grimoire might be better used as a source of excerpts for a newsletter accessible to paying subscribers?
Again, whether to abandon blogging in favor of running a newsletter is a concern best left to my future self. Nor need I do one or the other; I could maintain the blog and RSS feed for the tech savvy while a newsletter as a convenience accessible for a nominal fee — especially for the first thousand or so subscribers. I wonder if I could find a provider that doesn’t cater to Nazis and lets me do tiered subscriptions where the later you are to the party the more you pay to get in.
In the meantime, here's some further reading on blogs as commonplace books for interested readers.