A microblog for the useful things I keep forgetting

A couple of weeks ago I added a new section to this site: TIL (“today I learned”). It’s a home for the kind of short, useful findings I used to post to social media—things like the great SQLite repl litecli, the fact that cross compiling in Go Just Works, cryptographic right answers, or this great diff tool. These don’t warrant a full blog post; I rarely have more to say than “hey this is useful.”

The problem was that I had no reliable place to keep these things. Recently I wanted to use diffdiff again and simply couldn’t remember its name. Bookmarks have never worked for me, and I don’t expect that to change. Putting something in public, for whatever reason, is much easier for me to maintain.

A lightweight publishing workflow

So I set up a new /til/ folder with custom styling to make posts look a bit like tweets. A small Rake task (rake new_til) helps me create new posts quickly, and the section has its own RSS feed. In practice, I can often get a post up in about two minutes, which was the goal. The format is more for myself than for readers—now when I forget a link, I can look it up on the TIL page.

The page is inspired by Simon Willison’s TIL blog, though my posts are considerably shorter.

Not everything needs to be archived

This came out of thinking about what to do with years of tweets. The “POSSE” advice—post on your own site, syndicate elsewhere—sounds appealing in principle, but part of social media’s appeal for me is its ephemerality. Polls, questions, observations, and jokes can fade as they become less relevant.

It’s much easier to identify specific categories of things I actually want on a Real Website That I Own:

Everything else stays ephemeral. I do believe strongly in email lists, though—the blog posts and comics both have email and RSS options. I might add a weekly summary of TIL posts to the existing “blog posts from this week” mailing list.