Why I have these notes

My notes are a set of living pages, distinct from but connected to my blog. These pages are not fixed snapshots from moments in time, like my blog posts, but rather are meant to be continually reshaped over time. I’ve seen these sorts of things described as evergreen notes, digital gardens, or wikis.

I started these notes as an experiment in late July, 2026. Below are a few reasons why.

Living pages

There are a lot of ideas that I want to build up and evolve over time. I’ve been doing that through series of blog posts that are connected through hyperlinks and tags. It kinda works, but it’s messy and can be repetitive. For example, see my text-editors posts. I certainly don’t expect a reader to go read and digest an entire chain of posts about a topic.

These notes are a better place to do this sort of writing.

Supporting my blog

When writing my blog posts, I’m finding myself wanting to reference the same ideas over and over again. For example: why I like version control, why I edit files over SSH, how I make coffee, why I use a Peloton bike. I may have only haphazardly explained these things in the past, or had an explanation half-written in an old draft that I never got around to publishing.

Now I can move some of these ideas into these notes, which can start small and scrappy but grow over time. I can cite and expand upon them from my blog posts.

Puttering playground

This may be the biggest one.

There are times when I’m feeling, shall we say, over-motivated to blog. I also enjoy writing blog posts as a way to turn swirling half-thoughts into something more coherent. I find writing publicly quite helpful for this.

I can generate a lot of words when I’m in one of these modes. These notes don’t muddy up my RSS feed, so I can putter about in here to my heart’s content without inundating my poor RSS subscribers.

Backlinks

My notes July 31, 2026