On posting less, writing more

Spent a year posting to LinkedIn and watching the same paragraphs decay inside a feed that owes me nothing. This is the case for the canonical home.

There’s a version of this writing where I keep posting essays to LinkedIn and never own the URL they live at. That version has the upside of distribution. It has the downside of being one product decision away from disappearing.¹

The site you are reading is the source of record. LinkedIn becomes a distribution channel for the same words. Notes from the coulee bench in Lethbridge, photo essays from the Columbia Icefields, longer pieces that need room to breathe.

I’ve been pretending the platform is the work. The work is the work. The platform is a way to find readers, and a fragile one.

What changed

Three things, mostly:

• A note went sideways inside LinkedIn’s ranking and a piece of my own writing was effectively gone within a week.
• I started keeping notes for myself in a folder of MDX files, and they were better than the LinkedIn versions of the same notes.
• I read four essays from craigmod.com in a row and remembered what writing for a roof feels like.

The site is the work. The platform is a way to find readers, and a fragile one.

How it ships

The stack is small on purpose. Astro on Cloudflare Workers. Markdown in, site out. No CMS, no admin, no JavaScript except where a specific feature demands it.

The other reason to build this: the rhythm of writing for my own roof is different. There’s no algorithmic register to flatter, no opening hook engineered for a thumbstop. You start where the thought starts.²

I expect the first six months to be slow and uneven. That’s what a journal is supposed to be.