Blogging and the Imaginary Quality Bar
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Recently I realised that I’ve developed a self-imposed quality bar for blog posts. They need to be a certain length, and have a certain substance to them. They need to be generally useful in some way I can’t quite define, to some imagined future audience. They need to have images to break up the page, and opengraph data for when they’re linked to on social media. But… maybe they don’t? Those things all make sense for longer “article” type posts, but not so much for a personal blog.
I’ve done some fiddling so that I can make posts without all that extra stuff. We’ll see how it goes. The posts won’t be distinguished on the site (yet?), but I have set up separate RSS feeds for just short form posts and long form posts in case subscribers are radically opposed to one or the other. Now I can start blogging like it’s 2005 again. But hopefully with a bit less cringe.
I’ve been staring at this post in my editor for about five minutes. The urge to make it longer, more thorough, more article-like is really strong. This entire paragraph is only here as a compromise with myself so I can actually save and commit the post.
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