Build a link blog like Simon Willison

I'm inspired. My tiny link blog, Roderick.dev, has languished for a long time as I've thought through the right voice.

To the sharing of interesting things and thoughts.

I tend to suffer from scope creep in my blogs. "Oh, I found a quicker way to compute X, lets write a blog about it" becomes "I should write a library, write docs, run extensive comparatives, then publish it".

I've been getting better at fighting that temptation, but I still suck at it. Setting deadlines for blog posts usually helps me focus my efforts.

I had a similar problem with sonnet.io (some articles taking weeks to get done).

So, I started untested (https://untested.sonnet.io) where for 111 days no matter what I'd share a post per day. Here's the first post: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/111

Consistency really helps - there are posts that I had spent weeks on and barely anyone read them in the first place. Then, once I started posting smaller, messier notes almost daily, both the traffic (not that important to me) and the amount of interesting interactions with people (very important to me) went up by 100x.

Another way in which I avoided yak shaving/scope creep was to ditch my own site and rely on Obsidian Publish (I went back to my own solution after a year, as a reward for mostly sticking to the plan)

Some quick ideas:

- Multiple links in the same post make it difficult to organize discussions and thoughts.

- Monthly posts require extra effort to maintain and update, which didn't align with our initial goal of sharing more casually and recording our thoughts in real time.

- Modern static site generators support maintaining archive pages by month, so we no longer need to do it manually.

Hoping those ideas make sense to you.

Wow, thank you for this comment and for continuously sharing!