Next-Gen Blogging
Tags: blogging, writing, learninpublic
Published: 2020-03-26 00:27:08

Blogging is an age-old part of the web. It can be as simple as writing and hosting HTML pages or publishing through a centralized, walled-garden platform like Medium. It can be as complex as building your own self-hosted solution using all the bleeding-edge web tech.

In this post, I want to share some big and small innovations in blogging that have me excited for where the medium is headed.

_This post is the product of [a thread I tweeted earlier this month](https://twitter.com/jbrancha/status/1240137889952018433)._

## 🔀 Personal Again

First, there has been a general movement, within the web dev community, from platforms like Medium back to personal, self-hosted blogs. There are a lot of factors playing into this trend and reasons you might consider making blogging personal again. Give [_It's time to get personal_](https://24ways.org/2019/its-time-to-get-personal/) a read if you want to know more.

## 🌱 Digital Gardens

I'm seeing a growing contingent of people explore this idea of [a digital garden](https://dev.to/jbranchaud/the-digital-garden-l10). "To me, a digital garden is a digital space full of interconnected ideas and information that you collect, curate, tend to, and learn from over time." People are embracing a [Learn in Public](https://dev.to/jbranchaud/how-i-learned-to-learn-in-public-2f4m) mentality and [ditching the publish button](https://dev.to/jbranchaud/writing-without-publishing-3io5). This makes the web a more spontaneous, interesting, and collaborative place.

Here are some active digital gardens:
- [Tom Critchlow, tomcritchlow.com](https://tomcritchlow.com/)
- [Joel Hooks, joelhooks.com](https://joelhooks.com/)
- [Chris Biscardi, christopherbiscardi.com](https://www.christopherbiscardi.com/garden)
- [Others](https://twitter.com/mxstbr/status/1240674540780486657?s=20)

## ⚠ Post In Progress

[Kurt Kemple](https://twitter.com/kurtkemple) recently [shared an idea](https://twitter.com/kurtkemple/status/1239720869561335810) he implemented in his own digital garden. He adds indicators to posts to help signal whether they are still growing (🌱) or whether they have fully bloomed (🌸).

This idea plays nicely with digital gardens because it embraces this idea of [writing without publishing](https://dev.to/jbranchaud/writing-without-publishing-3io5) while still acknowledging the work that you polished and completed. In terms of [swyx's Digital Garden Terms of Service](https://www.swyx.io/writing/digital-garden-tos), it assumes the _right to be wrong_ (or incomplete) and helps indicate that to readers.

## 🍯 Blogging Honeypots

I’ve heard that [swyx](https://twitter.com/swyx) sometimes creates placeholder posts on his blog. If he sees that enough people click through to it or there are requests for it to be written, then he writes it.

I love this concept because I find myself with an ever-growing list of topics and ideas for blog posts. I'm never going to get to all of them. When I do find time to blog, it can be hard to know which one to pick up and write on. A blogging honeypot gives you some click-through numbers and maybe even twitter and email interactions that suggest what topics others would be interested in you writing about.

## 📨 Newsletter-ify Your Blog

[Kent C. Dodds](https://twitter.com/kentcdodds) and many others pre-release the content of a blog post in their newsletter. They later publish that content to their blog. This is a chance to reach more of your audience, the way they want to be reached. It's one of many ways to [multi-leverage your content](https://twitter.com/jbrancha/status/1242961421723410434?s=20).

You can take this a step further with a [shadow newsletter](https://joelhooks.com/shadow-newsletter-for-evergreen-emails-in-convertkit) that sends out date-less evergreen content whenever someone subscribes.

## 🔡 Blogging Primitives

[Tom Critchlow](https://twitter.com/tomcritchlow) recently wrote about the idea of [blogging patterns and primitives](https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/03/16/new-blogging-3/). Of the examples he shared, the one that caught my attention is the `<detail>` tag. I like the simplicity of it. It is built-in to The Platform™ as just HTML, yet it seems like a powerful way to make explorable, information dense pages -- like one might want to do with a digital garden.

Because so much blogging is done in markdown, I believe [MDX](https://mdxjs.com/) has something exciting to offer in terms of blogging primitives as well.

## ⛓ Blogchains

> "A blogchain is longform by other means. Containerized longform if you like. A themed blog-within-a-blog, built as a series of short, ideally fixed-length posts."
> -[Venkatesh Rao, _Constructions in Magical Thinking_](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2019/03/21/constructions-in-magical-thinking/)

This idea of a _blogchain_ comes from [Venkatesh Rao](https://twitter.com/vgr) and others at [ribbonfarm](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/). Tom Critchlow uses blogchains and has written about [how to build blogchains](https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/07/17/blogchains/) - check it out.

## 🎛 Make It Interactive

As JavaScript-based web tooling continues to get better (e.g. the React ecosystem), there are more and more opportunities to introduce interactivity into our blog posts.

I'm sure there are a ton of people doing exciting things in this category--[let me know of your favorites](https://twitter.com/jbrancha)--but the person that has stood out to me is [Josh Comeau](https://twitter.com/JoshWComeau). Several of Josh's blog posts have interactive demos that he uses to teach concepts in an engaging way as you read through the post. Here is a fun one on [dynamic bézier curves](https://joshwcomeau.com/animation/dynamic-bezier-curves/).

## 📆 Ditch Chronology

Most blogs we see have some sort of index page that lists every single post in reverse-chronological order. I feel like this post from 
[Amy Hoy](https://twitter.com/amyhoy), [_How the Blog Broke the Web_](https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/), is calling us back to hand crafted and curated webpages and blogs.

Here are some great examples of writers making their content accessible in a way that doesn't just list everything by date.

- [ribbonfarm's _For New Readers_](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/for-new-readers/)
- [Patrick McKenzie's _Greatest Hits_](https://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/)
- [Tom Critchlow's home page](https://tomcritchlow.com/), everything is collapsed into topical `<detail>` tags that you can expand and explore

## Conclusion

In case you hadn't noticed, many of these ideas cascade with one another. They tie together and make each other work better. I encourage you to explore these next-gen innovations in blogging, try applying them to your own blog and [let me know when you do](https://twitter.com/jbrancha), I'd love to check it out.

Are there innovations in blogging that you're excited about that I missed, [tell me about it on twitter](https://twitter.com/jbrancha).