The blog seems inactive for a few months, but I was actually frequently writing stuff here. The problem was that I was creating pages rather than posts recently.
Admittedly, it is hard to organize stuff either way. And organizing things is hard in general, so I don’t blame Workpress for this. And there are probably a plugin or two that fixes this, I am just too lazy to check them out.
The Dichotomy
Posts have an “at the moment” feel. Posts have timestamps. They form a content stream sorted by time. That was why I felt at home with blogging my Football Manager 2019 game with posts: I wanted a timeline, and I got a timeline.
And the same feeling can lead to negative experience as well: I have many more posts stuck as “draft” than pages, because I only expect complete stuff to appear on my timeline, but “complete” and “timely” can be contradictory.
Pages have the advantage of not advertising themselves even when I publish them. That seems to make me very eager to add new pages. However, there has to still be a time where I share a link to a page, which is the actual moment of publishing.
Pages also have the advantage that I do not need to pretend it’s readable. It can be a huge information dump, a long tutorial, whatever. I consider these things less suitable for posts, because when something shows on the timeline one more or less expect to see enough context to know what it’s about, but when they only live in their own space, they can contain less context and more meat.
There has been some ambiguity: I have been considering writing something about the board games I play recently. Most of the discussion should, in principle, does not depend on the time, and should belong to a page than a post. But on the other hand, board games are a hobby, and are part of my recent life experience. I feel I should absolutely make my timeline full of board games if I spend so much energy into it.
The Compromise
The “timed/timeless” distinction, as suggested by many websites, is a useful one, but a bit too abstract. I think I currently have some more concrete idea: I will use posts to write more about the progress and the thought process, and make the pages to look more neutral and objective. They could work in tandem this way.
This philosophy can also be applied to this post itself: I write this discussion as a post, because it contains the thought process of how I arrived in this conclusion. If one day I also maintain a collection of “philosophy of organization of contents in De Finibus”, then they belong to a post.