Daniel Thoughts Update
Hello!
It has been quite a while, over six months! I'm sending out a few updates as to what to expect from Daniel Thoughts going forward.
Content
First, I will be changing the content somewhat. Historically, I have primarily written essay-style posts that were philosophical in nature, connecting several different things I was reading. Writing well-thought-out essays is still a great ideal to strive for, but there are so many things I would like to share with you that don't fit into this mold. Initially, I thought something like the Reflections feed would help, but even then, I was putting too much pressure on myself to put something out that would be evergreen rather than topical.
Lately, I have been really enjoying Simon Willison's blog, which primarily focuses on technology, but also features some great posts about writing in general. He puts things he posts into three rough buckets that I would like to adopt:
- Things he has made - This could include coding projects, but I will also adopt this one for more extended essays.
- Things he has learned - Interesting things that you may not come across in your day-to-day life otherwise.
- Things he has found - Great things made by other people that have had an impact on him, which he would like to share.
These buckets helped me identify something I felt was lacking in the way I treated Daniel Thoughts. The learned and found buckets are more casual, a way for me to quickly share something interesting with less friction. What this practically means is that most of my posts now will be going into a page called Shorts. Small posts that fall into the "learned" and "found" buckets while still reserving the main Daniel Thoughts page for things I have "made".
I am motivated to make this change because I want it to be easier to get ideas out of my head. Many people use the metaphor of a river to describe their creative output. If you have a lot of ideas, but no outlet, your mind becomes like a swamp. Everything is mixing, and the old ideas don't make space for the new, leading to a messy mind. Processing and sharing ideas is core to having and recognizing new ones. By making it easier to share ideas, I hope to return to a place where new ideas flow.
Platform
Second, I have changed platforms. Substack is shockingly inflexible when it comes to these different types of content, so I recently chose to move all my posts over to a self-hosted Ghost instance[1]. For those who are unfamiliar, Ghost is similar to Substack, but it is entirely open-source. This means I have WAY more flexibility about customizing pages. Currently, the main customization is the neat linkouts on the Shorts page as shown below.
Linking out to other pages from the header was impossible on Substack, which is shocking to me, since link blogs are such a core part of my internet experience (though I suppose not everyone's). One downside of Ghost is that it doesn't have Footnote links, which seems like an obvious feature and is particularly disappointing because I love using footnotes.
As part of this move, I finally switched over to my new domain name, daniel.church. I purchased this domain over a year ago, when I realized 'church' was an available top-level domain. I doubt many people's last names are top-level domains, so I had to take advantage!
Frequency
Last, I recently started a new job. I joined DevClarity, a startup founded by two friends (both subscribers of Daniel Thoughts), two years ago. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Vulcan, making it a tough decision, but I am excited for what the future holds. So, while I am "soft relaunching" Daniel Thoughts, for lack of a better term, with these new forms of content and a new platform, I am uncertain how often I will be able to publish.
As always, I hope everyone is doing well and look forward to communicating more with everyone through Daniel Thoughts soon!
- For those interested in how I moved over to Ghost, this is a helpful guide. It is a combination of PikaPods, Cloudflare, and Mailgun that were remarkably simple (and cheap) to assemble.
