Blog posts without titles.

Picking a title for my blog posts has been one of the reasons I don't write more often. A title is restrictive (ex. it has to outline what the post is about) and even opinionated (ex. it points to what's most important in a post).

When I deal with a very specific and well defined subject, it is easy: "A simple bash script for encrypted chat over keybase fs (kbfs)", "How to archive your tweets", or "Your startup’s blog should be on Medium.".

But, the blogging style I really love is the one that resembles a traditional diary, where one can just throw in everything without a well-defined beginnings and ends, without balanced structure, without even worrying about how a pasta recipe can be in the same page with politics and a bash script.

So, for the last few days I decided to turn my notes.vrypan.net linkblog into something that looks more like a diary and less than what blogging has become to look like:

• One post per day, with no structure whatsoever. I may update a post multiple times throughout a day to add new things. I just put a separator after each update.
• Since there has to be a title, for technical reasons (linking or RSS), I use the day as the title: "Thursday, September 22, 2016".
• As a bonus, I wrote a small script that will append at the end of each day my latest tweets to the day's entry.

It worked wonders! I've started blogging again, without worrying if what I'm about to write is "important" enough to have a post of its own, or if it's so short that the title will be as long as the post, or what the title should be for a random, incomplete thought.

As notes.vrypan.net grows, I may have to do some design changes that will align the look of the site with the content (the obvious one is there is no reason to show a post date, when the post title is the date, but there are other smaller changes I may do too).

I'm also interested to see how notes.vrypan.net will affect blog.vrypan.net. Time will tell.

"Captain's log, stardate 3141.9. A full hour has elapsed since interception of the strange vessel. Our presence alongside is still being completely ignored. Although our sensors continue to show signs of equipment and life aboard, there's been no indication of danger to us."

"Captain's log, supplemental. Alongside the SS Botany Bay for ten hours now, a boarding party of engineering and medical specialists are now completing their examination of the mysterious vessel. Attempts to revive other sleepers await our success or failure with the casualty already beamed over. Dr. McCoy is frankly amazed at his physical and recuperative power." -- Captain James T. Kirk

Photo by Memory Alpha