"Posts", "Notes" and "Articles"

I am comfortably past the half-way point of my 30 day blogging challenge. It’s been tremendously valuable for figuring things out. Allowing the quality of the content to drop still makes me uneasy, but I know that if I had put more effort into the quality then I would have fallen short on quantity. Being able to crank out the articles is a skill. It’s not one that comes naturally to me. I like to take my time.

Next month I start a new job, which could soak up a lot of my time and attention. The frequency of posts will drop off. I want my main output to be high quality articles, even if that means only one article a month. There is room for this more freeform kind of content, though. It could be interesting to my readers (whoever they may be) as well as valuable for my own process. Perhaps this is the difference between posts and articles.

Notes are short. Each note is about one specific thing. Most notes make a specific claim in the title, then support that with a couple of paragraphs about what that claim means. It might link to other notes providing evidence for the claim, but the note does not try to mix both evidence and conclusion. Likewise, any analysis weighing two claims up against each other belongs in another note. Want to stitch together a few ideas about a similar topic? Write a note for each idea, and a list note that holds them together. Linking ideas together is itself an idea. This kind of composition means you can have notes all the way down.

Articles take real effort. It’s a way to express an idea in some level of depth. The evidence, the conclusion, the impact and the comparison in relation to other ideas are all included in the same piece. It’s self-contained. Although the finished article reads from top to bottom, you probably won’t write it that way. You’ll draft some ideas. Rearrange them. Fill in some gaps. Take away some fluff. Eventually you reach a point where you say “Yes! This is the thing worth publishing.” Writing an article benefits from stepping away from the keyboard. It helps to sleep on it. You want to chew over the ideas.

A post is somewhere in-between. You can write a post in a single session, but it expresses more than would fit into a single note. This is where you start to see which ideas fit together. A post is a step in your working. For a post, more than for a note or an article, the publishing date matters. This is your expression of a concept or a claim at a particular moment in time. You might post about the same exact topic months or even years later, as your understanding of the world evolves. Once you’ve published a post, that’s it.

Perhaps I can find a way to combine all three of these on this site. Notes that are the distillation of a single idea. A dictionary definition or a single statement with a bit of justification. Notes might be rewritten or deleted entirely. Posts are a little larger, and are ephemeral by design. Posts are best grouped by time rather than by topic. They show the evolution of my thoughts. Posts are a means to an end, a way of feeling out the territory. Posts form the basis for articles. An article is the result of craft. It contains no more and no less than it needs to.

Articles should be the most prominent aspect of the site. They are, in the truest possible sense, the finished article. They represent my entire viewpoint on a specific subject. There might be a mix of text, code, diagrams, photographs, maybe even an interactive widget. Whatever medium is the most effective way to communicate the idea.

I can’t see myself committing to publishing articles on a specific cadence, especially not right now, but I recognise them as the goal. With my current time blocks, I could publish at least one note and at least one post each week. The notes and posts are helpful stepping stones. Stepping up from posts to articles is much less intimidating than jumping straight in to writing articles. Choose your words carefully!