Daniel Kalak’s journal

2024-01-08T22:45

Over the last 24 hours, I have been thinking about putting all of my articles into long, theme-specific HTML files that contain multiple articles each (as article elements) – just like this one.

This would rid me of the need to think up filenames, and it would rid my readers of the need to click through multiple files, just to be disappointed that the ones they click on might be too short for, or too far from, their taste.

By curating my articles and putting them into different categories instead of pushing them through a single chronological feed, I would approach what bikobatanari argues for. At the same time, by having one page for each category (with multiple articles per file) instead of several, I would approach what Jeff Huang argues for. It looks like a win-win situation.

2024-01-07T22:38

I just watched Piaffe (2022) by recommendation of a friend this week.

It is a remarkable thing about arthouse films: every choice of detail desires a description and despises an explanation.

2024-01-07T20:13

I see a similar restlessness as mine in m15o: first m15o had a smol.pub feed on miso.town with Gemini posts from 2021-05/2022-02, then an HTML Journal on m15o.ichi.city with HTML posts from 2022-05/08, and now a Nex journal on nightfall.city with plaintext posts from 2022-11/2023-12 (and probably more coming).

In a sense, this gives me hope: maybe I’m not doing too bad after all when I’m jumping from one format to the next.

2024-01-07T19:23

So there we are. After having structured my article listing as an HTML Blog, I have now set up this HTML Journal as well.

I have been thinking about this a lot during the last two days. I feel great restlessness and insecurity about the structure of my website. I have already mentioned this in a post about principles as idols.

On the one hand, I think that such a time-based feed, where the entries are inserted directly into a single file, would do me good: sometimes it feels like too much of a hassle to set up an entire HTML document with its own filename and its own title just for a quick thought. On the other hand, I feel like I am betraying the “garden” philosophy of the handmade retroweb by adopting a chronological “stream” structure.

My excuse is that the benefits should outweigh the detriments, and that this journal file is a different kind of communication: this journal is more like speech, whereas my blog articles are more like writing. Writing is edited. But speech is final, and easy. You cannot take back what you say, but it doesn’t matter, because you can always say more to amend it. I want to be able to speak to you like this, not only through formal writing.