For my work, I picked up the habit of transferring my daily notes and insights from my physical notebooks to an Obsidian vault. Thanks to using Obsidian and git, I have a locally-stored, version-controlled, and easily searchable overview of my work that I can reference when preparing reports and presentations.
Equivalently, I miss a digital space where I can transfer personal insights, store interesting links and quotes, and write down notes unrelated to my work. Topics of these notes could include everything from programming, research, and literature, to physical exercise and ceramics.
Why make these notes public?
I could start a new Obsidian vault for these notes, but I think they should be someplace public as I want to “work with my garage door up.” I also want to keep up a daily writing streak: if I would just create another private Obsidian vault, it’ll be too easy to convince myself to skip writing to do other things instead. Public challenges like #100DaysToOffload seem appealing to participate in, as well.
Why share these on a personal website?
We can write whatever we want on personal websites, without being vulnerable to tech companies and their social media algorithms + keeping ownership of content. I am currently hosting this website through GitHub Pages, but I can pack up my content and move it elsewhere whenever I want. Read more about this in this great article by Matthias Ott:
“If you decide to publish your work on a platform like Medium, you’re giving away control over it. What if Medium suddenly decided to extend the already existing paywall to all articles? There’s not much you could do about it. Simply because you don’t own your content anymore.”
“But maybe the most compelling reason why a personal website (⋯) is incredibly valuable is this: community. Since the days of “guest books”, personal websites have been a place to receive feedback and discuss ideas and concepts with others. (⋯) Now imagine, for a moment, an environment where a decentralized fabric of connected personal sites allows everyone to publish their own content but also enables each individual to engage in an open discussion – answering, challenging, and acknowledging the ideas of others through this universe of personal sites.”
To allow for this engagement, I’m planning to add Webmentions to this website soon.
Why share unpolished work?
By trying to write and publish a quick note every day, I’ll hopefully improving my writing. Not all of these notes will be polished, which is why I plan to keep them separate from my regular posts. It is okay to create unpolished things — a quote from Robin Rendle:
“I feel like I’m free now to write absolute junk. And this is vital for any creative thing! You have to feel like your mistakes won’t be judged, that there’s no one watching you write shameful, embarrassing things. Because if you have all that pressure of trying to write the next great American novel then I reckon you’re destined to fail.”
Hopefully, these notes give me inspiration to write some longer posts, where I can combine ideas and flesh out concepts of multiple related notes.
Writing streak
I currently have a writing streak of 0 daysUpdated on Dec 20, 2024
, and my largest streak to date is 20 daysAchieved on Aug 27, 2024
. You can find these daily notes here. To find the note for a corresponding date, go to /notes/YYYY-MM-DD. Each date since 2024-08-07 should have an existing entry, even if I did not write anything that day.