Category Archives: Blogging

Experiment: Categories for my posts

I’m trying something new. I added WordPress tags for higher level categories of content that cut across the typical tags:

  • Deep Dive: Longer, more detailed posts that require significant research. Very expensive to produce.
  • Essay: Nonfiction writing, usually nontechnical.
  • Lab Notes: Rough notes, typically technical, usually bullet points about some topic.
  • Micropost: Tiny, short thought.

I hope that by categorizing things this way and acknowledging that this blog is a collection of different art forms (that appear similar because they’re all writing), I’ll be more comfortable publishing publicly. For a while I was scared to publish because I don’t have as much time for deep dives before, which is what people seemed to really like, but acknowledging these different categories and specifically calling out a shorter, rougher, less polished piece as such takes the pressure off of publishing it.

Evergreen tweets

Twitter’s length limit is deceptive. At a glance, it suggests that writing tweets should be easy and quick. This is true for superficial tweets, but does not mean all tweets are written quickly and with little effort.

Twitter is actually a platform for concise writing, and writing concisely is harder than writing verbosely. There are certain tweets I spend a lot of time on and it’s shame to have them get lost in my feed. So I’m storing them here.

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