A personal site, or a blog, is more than just a collection of writing. It’s a kind of place - something that feels like home among the streams. Home is a very strong mental model.

I’ve talked before about streams, campfires and gardens. But what about digital homes?

“Home” has a certain kind of emotion. I love Winnie Lim’s meditation on a website feeling like home:

And homes are built - Frank Chimero’s piece on building a digital homestead always resonates with me:

This notion that building something allows you to embed your own style, taste and ideas into not just the content but the layout, structure. The walls are alive with your intentions.

And, much like a homestead, personal sites are never finished. They can be extended, re-built, maintained, polished, fixed. Brian Lovin has this wonderful meditaiton on incrementally correct personal sites:

So there’s something brewing here - something about building a digital homestead, building it in a way that reflects your soul.

And the idea of building is interesting. Not gardens and streams but architecture! What kind of architecture is necessary for a blog? Perhaps it’s a geometry of irregular shapes, of bricolage. As Alan Jacobs writes in architectural blogging:

From these meditations on the architecture of blogging three questions emerge:

1. How do you create pathways (and desire paths?) through your site? How do people start, journey, get lost and ultimately find their way through your site? I recently added a “start here” section to my writing page but I’ve been tinkering with blogchains and series of writing. What other structures emerge?
2. How to archive, index and search? I recently re-architected how search works on my site. It’s not finished yet but I hope to use search as a way to search not only my site but all kinds of other stuff: my bookmarks, my wiki, my notes, my tweets even. Search can be a way to go down rabbitholes. Inspiration: Building Monocle, a universal personal search engine for life.
3. Using a combination of static site and tachyons.css I find it extremely easy to iterate my way forward. Tinkering with my blog is possible piecemeal, there are no databases, no monolithic CSS files, very few dependencies.. It’s clunky at times but I have this sense that every time I build I don’t accumulate tech debt and that’s actually remarkably powerful for a site that’s been running for a decade or so…

Questions as Scaffolding

Questions are unreasonably powerful. And maybe, just maybe, questions can be the scaffolding for the architecture of blogging. Reframing interest areas or topics into questions is a powerful enabler. This paper shows how “specific curiosity” is a driver of creativity:

I’ve dabbled with this recently by trying to make sense of what I’m to through the lens of lines of inquiry.

And finally - I found this beautiful personal site from Emmanuel Quartey where he has structured his writing and site around central questions:

What a magnificent execution. Questions as scaffolding and curiosity engine for building your own digital homestead, bit by brick.