Despite being a ordered list, this is not "the best bookstores", or any such similar thing. I visit different stores at different times depending on the mood I'm in, and I'm always happy to be in a bookstore and happy that these bookstores exist, even the not-very-good ones.
: )
Ratings and rankings are a fundamentally fraught way to interact with the world, but I think fundamentally worthwhile. They're a way to take something that is important to you seriously, to make space to really deeply consider what exactly it is that brings you joy.
I want to know why you've chosen the half star / 5 star system!
The question of whether I link to one of my old posts or not isn’t answered by whether they’re related, but by whether the act of linking serves a purpose.
different approaches to writing and different (conceptions of) audiences... linking with a reader in mind, v. linking with the assumption that only you might return in the future
I recently started building a website that lives at wesleyac.com, and one of the things that made me procrastinate for years on putting it up was not being sure if I was ready to commit to it. I solved that conundrum with a page outlining my thoughts on its stability and permanence:
It's worth introspecting on why any given person might hesitate to feel that they can commit. This is almost always comes down to "maintainability"—websites are, like many computer-based endeavors, thought of as projects that have to be maintained. This is a failure of the native Web formats to appreciably make inroads as a viable alternative to traditional document formats like PDF and Word's .doc/.docx (or even the ODF black sheep). Many people involved with Web tech have difficulty themselves conceptualizing Web documents in these terms, which is unfortunate.
If you can be confident that you can, today, bang out something in LibreOffice, optionally export to PDF, and then dump the result at a stable URL, then you should feel similarly confident about HTML. Too many people have mental guardrails preventing them from grappling with the relevant tech in this way.
if I died today, thoughts.page would probably only last until my credit card expires and DigitalOcean shuts down my servers
I've noted elsewhere that NearlyFreeSpeech.Net has a billing system where anyone can deposit funds for a hosted account. That still leaves the matter of dealing with breakage, but for static sites, it should work more or less as if on autopilot. In theory, the author could die and the content would remain accessible for decades (or so long as fans have the account ID and are willing to continue to add funds to it), assuming the original registrant is also hosting their domain there and have auto-renewal turned on.
Trying to keep websites around forever is struggling against the nature of the web.
As above, I think this is more a consequence of struggling against the nature of the specific publishing pipelines that most people opt for. Many (most) Web-focused tech stacks are not well-suited to fulfill the original vision of the Web, but people select them as the foundation for their sites, anyway.
Implementing this interconnection well enough to be useful imposes costs, though: it can make it feel more difficult to write about topics that aren’t connected to the superstructure of ideas I already have, and which don’t slot neatly into existing taxonomies.
Well, we're all trying to assemble the dumbo feathers that will work well for our own individual brains. The linked commonplacing methods would entirely lock up my own creativity -- the desire to optimize any hierarchical organization would absolutely wreck me. But I think it's interesting that this seems to be shared across notetaking and web publishing for Wesley. When I write notes, I'm structuring things for myself and myself only (modulo the agora, I guess). When I put things on my website, I'm thinking of how I can express what I want to express to the reader.
If I change my opinion on something, it’s much clearer to simply write what my new opinion is, than to try to edit and untangle everything I’ve written in the past.
Recently Resonate had a wave of interest since Bandcamp was bought by Epic Games, and a lot of people were very alarmed by old mentions of blockchain on bits of their website. Now they're struggling to correct the record but a lot of people have been fairly turned off. I don't know that the idea of a magazine's archives being unchanged tends to work well in the digital world -- is it always more honest to present your discarded and carried opinions with equal space, a date to imply precedence?
The problem, though, is that a large part of why I find this mode of thinking useful is that you can create useful insights by connecting nearly anything to anything else: the world is fundamentally so highly interconnected that trying to explicitly capture connections between ideas is bound to fall short. Everything is connected to everything else.
Must "capturing" connections be in the service of modeling them? I dunno, for me I mostly like creating the links because it creates the serendipity of being reminded of things in different contexts.
It’s tempting to think that breaking this externally enforced temporal linearity will make one’s ideas more legible, but I’m not convinced: I find it easier to understand writing where the influences are clearly and simply laid out.
The nonlinear traversal of Wikipedia is probably the most important encounter with written material I've had in my life, so I tend to emulate that in miniature more than assembling a Matuschak-esque explanatory codex that hopes to maximize legibility.
Actually, I think I'm a bit skeptical of legibility in general; maybe I'm happy to cede this altogether. Wikis: less legible!
I find it’s often better to summarize a few ideas, rather than link to the place I first explored those ideas.
Ah, well. For me, it's been very freeing to let go of a lot of conventions of "the stream" and let myself revise and delete. I want someone who comes across my site to find gardened content, with paths that expose bits that aren't visible from the top. I like thinking about "If someone's reading this, what else might they find valuable?" as well as "What should link here that'd direct people here who'd enjoy it?"
If reading links is required to understand the post, and there is heavy interlinking, that means that reading the entire site is required to understand any of the ideas.
Is that much different from what's being implied by "As a reader, that’s easy to understand: we all know that opinions can change over time, and people can get a clear view of what I believe now, by reading my recent writing, as how I came to those beliefs, by reading through my past posts."? It's just that the path we're expected to take is chronological or comprehensive, I guess.
structuring your thought around links between existing ideas means that there’s a pull to categorize every new thought as related to some grouping of existing thoughts.
Ah -- this is interesting! For me in my private notetaking I do a ton of linking to things that don't exist. I don't know, maybe other peoples are bothered by those orphan links, but for me, I get benefit from being prompted to think "what does this fit in with?" without too much care for "do I already have that?"
But... that's a bit different from my public site.
It pains me to see people build websites with no feeling of obligation to them — when you put something out into the world, it is your responsibility to care for it.At the same time, I wonder if this obsession with permanence is misplaced.
I mean, I think it is.
I haven't put something into the world -- I've made a listing in the DNS system. Then when someone asks me for it, I send them my thing -- not "the world"! My eternal complaint.
For instance, a safe withdrawal rate of 3% and a cost of $12 for domain renewal would mean that a one-time payment of $400 should be enough to keep a website up ~forever.
The ICANN bit is the easy part -- who's going to manage the hosting, and how much do they get paid?
Google had a surprisingly high number of True Believers, so I mostly stayed quiet about my thoughts on the tech industry while I was at work. I had some friends who shared my disillusionment, but techlash hadn’t made its way into the tech industry yet: people seemed to really believe that they were changing the world for the better. Sure, there are a lot of bad startups out there, but the startup I work for is good. Pay no attention to the VCs behind the curtain.Over the past few years, the disillusionment of the public has slowly been seeping into the tech industry.
For better or worse, True Believers tend to be a way bigger thing at Google than even at other BigTech cos. of its size.
and if you want software that's any more niche than that
That's the problem—thinking about this in terms of "wanting software". It's wanting to publish. Tech workers have an especially hard time understanding this.
You're probably not under the impression that when the last person you heard of who got their book published finally pulled it off, they did it as a matter of wanting, say, an InDesign workflow versus something else. Because they weren't, and it didn't factor into their motivations at all—not even a little bit.