What I've been doing instead of blogging
As I said in On writing as an obligation,
A few days ago I realized something. I don’t like writing. I don't know if I will continue writing.
Which results in a blog being a strange format for me to entertain. I suspect I live ever-hopeful that one day I'll wake up and furiously churn out insightful articles, although that has yet to happen.
Instead of blogging, I've been examining my habits. One thing I've noticed is I love reading interesting articles and newsletters every day, and then bookmarking them to come back to comment on later.
Except that I wouldn't come back. My list of bookmarks would just grow like some graveyard of idealism. Why should I struggle to write my own words when I had so many authors who said it better than I ever could?
Instead of blogging, I was reading articles and finding amazing sentances and paragraphs I thought perfectly captured my feelings. I started saving these as Notes in Instapaper to come back to comment on specifically, rather than the entire article. And suddenly, rather than writing longform posts, I was far more interested in an automation to send these notes to my blog to be shared with the world.
So I built just that. I built a chrome extension that would send highlighted webpage text to the backend of my blog, to be published with attribution to the original source. This blog already uses Docusaurus, Markdown, and Azure DevOps with CICD so it wasn't too much work to create an Azure Serverless Function to create a new Markdown file with the quoted text and link to the original article. With one click, I can post a quote without breaking the flow of my reading, leaving the tab, or any form of context switching. It's all inline and works splendidly.
So that's what I did instead of blogging. I accidentally created a link blog while pursuing what I was interested in, rather than what I thought I should do.
I realize now that link blogging deserves to be included a third category of low stakes, high value writing. We could think of that category as things I’ve found.
My approach to running a link blog
As I continue to read high-value articles, I'll continue to share stand-out quotes here. All posts published using this method are available under the ICYMI tag. And what is ICYMI?
written abbreviation for in case you missed it: used on social media when posting something that is not new
As a final callout, if you'd rather only read my original content rather than the ICYMI posts, see the original-content posts.