What to put in a blog

I overthink things. I also rewrite, remake, remix, redo, and recontextualize things constantly. This often leads to procrastinating and second-guessing.

All day every day, I write to myself in a private Discord server. I use it as a notes app, and as a way to explain ideas and concepts to myself. Explaining something as if there's someone else listening is often the best way for me to work out an idea. There's plenty of ideas I talk to actual people about, but I always prefer to have an idea fully formulated, or a story concluded before I tell anyon about it.

I also spend a lot of my time making spreadsheets, charts, timelines, and lists. I've spent the past 4 years assembling a fragmented lifelog, mostly because I wanted to have something to document in detail and I know the most about my own life. It has many times proven extremely useful to have exact dates for moments from my life.

All of this is to say that I have a lot of things that I think would be fun, funny, or interesting to make into pages on this website. However, formatting and organization always holds me back. For several weeks now I have been debating what should even be on this /blog directory. The post about my history with Spotify was unlinked anywhere for four months because I couldn't decide if it should be on the site. Today I restored it (and rewrote a large chunk of it) because I think I finally figure it out...

What belongs on the /blog directory is... anything!

Specifically, I had a few ideas for events of my life to write about that happened years ago, but I felt weird about attaching a current date to something that happened so long ago. My counter-argument was that literally everything I could write about would be something that happened in the past. My blogpost about my trip to Vancouver for the LCD Soundsystem concert and Tails of Summer convention was something that happened in the past, but only by a few days. I seriously started wondering about what the statute of limitations was for writing a blog post. Should it only be allowed if I write it within two weeks? If it's been longer than that have I just missed my chance to write about it? I figured a work around was to wait for anniversaries like "It's been ten years since I went on this trip so let's reflect on it."

The easy answer - and the one I ended up settling on - is to just try just writing whatever I want, whenever. While this is certainly a nice sentiment, I know already it's going to lead to more self-debates in the future. Me writing about a trip I took opens Pandora's Box for more travel blogs. The Spotify post also opens the door for writing more about stories from my life, histories of old projects, and my experiences. While this is good because it means I'll hopefully write more stuff here, it also brings up several questions.

If I were to write a post about a trip I took ten years ago, wouldn't it make more sense to have it labelled as 2016?

At the moment, all my blogposts are listed in the order I wrote them. Maybe when I have a lot more posts, I can reorganize them into categories instead of purely chronological. Or maybe I could have a tag system for years the posts are applicable to. Then again, why not just have them be the date I wrote them. The Spotify post applies to 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021, but 2026 is when I decided to tell that story. I can just decide any day is when I want to tell a particular story. I have 26 years of life to catch up on, if I intend to fill up this page with back-dated posts...

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