This resonates. I've found myself weirdly almost embarrassed that my blog is backed by an Evernote notebook, it feels so primitive
As a programmer, shouldn't I have written my own CMS???
But works great! And it's way less maintenance and fiddling than a custom CMS
Conversation
I remember feeling the “exe is real” feeling on DOS too, but I think it’s more than signaling. It was the maximally robust and portable form of code that was least dependent on user skills or environment. So wanting to make exes was wanting to make the most real thing.
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Here, I’d never run a blog on Evernote. It’s an entirely unnecessary dependency on a piece of proprietary software that has nothing to do with blogging and might evolve in ways that hurt blogging. I still prefer Wordpress because it actually is the exe of blogging.
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Yeah I really worry about the dependency bit, especially considering what a mess the company has been in for ages
The tradeoff is worth it to me because it makes the publishing step incredibly low-friction, so I end up publishing more
At least I think it's worth it... we'll see
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Are you publishing more of what you want without compromising your notes? I thought I’d use roam to draft ideas but that never worked because I find my note taking is too far upstream content wise.
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Yeah it's been fine. I like having my notebook span the full spectrum of primitive thought fragments all the way up to polished essays (and everything in between)
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Artifacts found at the polished end are always an evolution of the rough end, so having separation between upstream and downstream never made sense to me. It sounds like you may feel differently?
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Yeah, I need to move media to level up the idea. This is why I’ve never successfully turned a Twitter thread into a hit blog post. I have to refactor the core and reinvent it as a blog
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Whoa I never realized some people work this way. I'm exactly the opposite! I like everything to smoothly flow from one form to the next, for ideas to take shape without me fully realizing it
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My way is very creative destructive. Often nothing of the original thought will survive at the other end, or only a core metaphor. I don’t think of it as a production flow, since my output is often as unfinished as my input. It’s phase changes via higher temperatures/pressures.
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A puddle of water and a rough frozen patch are both “unfinished” rough water. “Finished” water is more like filtering and bottling. I make dirty ice from dirty water, not purified bottled water.
That matches my experience actually
I misspoke when describing one end of the spectrum as "polished". When I visit things on that end, I always think of rabbitholes I could've/should've gone down. A better description is "expanded", i.e. an essay is an expanded thought fragment
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