The HTML Journal and HTML Blog formats
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Having a journal is a great way to self-reflect on our daily lives. Journals are deeply personal. We speak about our anxieties, our hopes and dreams. We speak about the bad things and the good things. We don't need to fake it, since we're writing mostly for ourselves, because we cannot not write. I feel like those vulnerabilities that we write about in our journals are what connect us, and what makes us human. Writing a journal is keeping a record of a time and a place. It's often unfiltered and unstructured, because we need our journal to put structure to our thoughts. They are updated frequently, sometimes a few times a day. A format to write these is the HTML Journal.
However, every now and then, we're looking to dive deeper on a subject. We're using the learnings from our day-to-day to compose something that's not linked to a single day, but rather that has its own identity. These can be essays, milestones or announcements. I'm writing one of such right now. :) A journal might not be the best place to write those. They'd be easily missed, lost in a sea of daily experiences. A format I suggest for these is HTML Blog.
While some people might prefer to only write a blog, and others to only write a journal, I don't think both are mutually exclusive, given how different they are in nature. In fact, I added a blog page to this site to list all the longer-form posts. The journal and the blog both have their own feed, allowing you to decide which one you'd like to subscribe to. I've also updated the Neon Kiosk to support both journals and blogs!
I'm hoping those little formats will encourage us to keep writing our HTML manually in an accessible way (HTML is actually great for writing!), lower the barriers to generate a feed, and ultimately allow you and I to build our own "timeline", full of people we enjoy reading. Thanks for reading!