Introducing Blips and Link Rhizomes

Here We Go, What’s Our Scenarios?

Blips

Blog posts feel to me like they should involve a few paragraphs, and probably shouldn’t happen more than once a day. Maybe just a few a week is what feels right for them on my own site. (This feeling is just for my own writerly headspace, not a feeling about how others should conceive of posts on their sites!) I’m looking for something in between this more considered blog post and a thought I’d put on a microblogging site like Mastodon, and one that will play nicely with RSS, unlike the “meant to be revised continually” notes in my digital garden.

Therefore, I’m trying out this separate category of posts, for things that can be as off-the-cuff as Jekyll allows, including multiple a day. Let’s see where this takes us!

I’ve also reflecting on the fact that I’ve added a fair number of things in the notes section since 2020, which is the last time I wrote a blog post—and so to RSS feedss, nothing has happened in that whole time. So I’m thinking I might also start making a new blogpost whenever I add a note, or at least make round-up posts of “these are recently added notes.” Either of these mean that notes will show up in RSS feeds once, but not automatically re-appear with each revision.

Link Rhizomes

As I’ve been tinkering with this site this holiday break, I noticed that the links in the sidebar author profile had grown unruly and could stand a very substantial pruning. Alongside this, I’ve also noticed people using Linktree, Link Me, and similar services for sharing “hey! I’m also over here!” in a centralized space.

So I figured I’d move the trimmed links into a new page, using that “other places I exist online” link page pattern.

However, I wanted to follow something like the POSSE principle, where I publish (on my) own site and share elsewhere, rather than relying on other services that can easily go the way of the dodo Twitter.

Putting this together with my fondness of Dave Cormier’s repeated use of rhizome metaphors (as well as uses of that metaphor by other folks, like Deleuze & Guattari), it dawned on me that “rhizome” would be a great name for this pattern.

And thus, links rhizome sprouted up.

Conclusions That Don’t Conclude

Adding the “blip” category will give this site a current total of five categories:

• blips (for smaller posts)
• blog (for what I think of as blog posts; I’ll need to add this retroactively to most current posts, I think)
• weekly assemblages (weekly linkpost roundups)
• monthly signal boosts (monthly linkpost roundups)
• notes (on whatever interval)

That seems quite workable for the moment. And as is nice about most things online, it can be revised as necessary.

I’d also be quite glad for people interested in managing their own link rhizomes instead of using hosted services to use the links-rhizome pattern.

For those of us who already have websites, it’s one more way to take a sort of POSSE approach: “Publish on your Own Site, Share Elsewhere.”

Onwards!