Old posts are now here
I've been working on republishing my old posts here [on Squarespace]—check out the blog archive. You'll see that the tags and other metadata are incomplete. In particular, many of my posts from 2017 to 2022 are untitled. This was intentional and there are a few reasons for it.
I wanted to keep microblogging, but I wanted to do it on my own website — not on Twitter, not on Mastodon. I had done some research and found that in the early days of the web, it was common for website owners to publish blog updates without a title. Titles didn't become commonplace until CMS software like WordPress entered the mainstream. Titles also makes posts feel much more formal, so I felt like eschewing them would help me feel freer to post interesting things.
I’m not sure if I’ll keep doing untitled posts; they make the archive a bit messy and don’t have a link on the search page. I could avoid cluttering the archive by having a separate blog for microposts (I don’t really want to do that, just because). I could also potentially try to modify the search page to show a date/time link to the post (I bet I’d have to upgrade my Squarespace plan to do that). If you have other ideas or concepts I should look at, tell me on Threads.
Update (2024-08-23): Squarespace 7.1 throws an error in the editor when you search blog posts if you have untitled posts. (This did not happen on 7.0.) Support said my options were to use titled posts, remove the untitled posts, or "ignore the error message as it’s only on the backend”. So, no more untitled posts here.
Related posts
2017-02-08: Microblogging on Squarespace
2017-02-23: IndieWeb is promising, but the implementation needs work to have broad appeal