A self-indulgent rationale for this secret public notebook

Inspired by comedian Mike Birbiglia, I’m thinking of this as a "secret public journal" where I’ll publish lightly edited things that might be worth sharing with a few people. Hopefully these things will benefit from the shock of perspective you get when pressing “send” on email. Maybe somebody else will find them interesting, but maybe it’ll just be me.

I’m in a cooloff phase or something about using services to publish or host stuff. Wait a few years and a shocking amount of our common record goes up in smoke as these services d/evolve, die off, or accounts quietly expire. A friend’s WordPress blog with years of book-related posts is reduced to a lone page meekly announcing pageok. An old hosted blog lapses and its subdomain is given away. Wedding photos become unlinkable, their resolution degraded. Only Archive.org is there to let me remember or share a link.

I don’t know what the best medium is for a secret public notebook, but I’ll start with this plain text page written with markdown. All the cool kids doing “personal knowledge management” seem to feel this is the most future-proof way to go and I don’t know enough yet to say otherwise. (👈 Now I do! That was a bad idea. - Self Editor)

We’ll see how this goes!

Update: Not well! After posting this as plain text, I'm seriously underwhelmed. Guess that seems obvious in retrospect. Glad I tried, though.

I could setup a markdown parser, but that'd add layers of complexity and just render this as html anyway. It'd be simpler to write this as an html file in the first place and I'd like to share something today.

OK, done.✔