TL;DR: blogging frequency may decrease here; higher-variance, lower-mean blogging at scraps.benkuhn.net.
I’ve noticed lately that I’m becoming more of a perfectionist about blogging.
Partly I may be becoming a victim of my own (extremely minor) success after seeing four of my posts make the Hacker News frontpage. Suddenly I realized that yes, people actually do care if I write higher-quality, less-trivial posts. Unfortunately, explicitly trying for higher quality doesn’t work very well with my blogging process, which mostly goes as follows:
Have a Beeminder that charges me money if I don’t blog once or twice a week
Make a bunch of false starts that don’t seem like they’ll lead anywhere interesting; abandon most
Spend a bunch of time frantically writing crappy things right before the deadline
Occasionally get grabbed by some idea that turns into a longer/more interesting post
Spend a bunch of time trying to write two posts at once so that I could keep current with the Beeminder without prematurely publishing the long post
The basic problem with this workflow is that there’s nothing really feeding into the crucial “get grabbed by some idea” step. That relies on me having a bunch of things bouncing around my head. But if I’m under pressure to publish interesting content, then I have to prioritize, and that means trying to avoid “false starts” instead of letting them bounce around for a while. This prioritization works in the short run, but ultimately results in having a much smaller arsenal of stuff to write about.
So! I’ve made a secondary site at scraps.benkuhn.net where I try to get more ideas bouncing around, by posting less discriminately. You may or may not find it interesting.