New microblog with TILs

I added a new section to this site a couple weeks ago called
TIL (“today I learned”).
the goal: save interesting tools & facts I posted on social media
One kind of thing I like to post on Mastodon/Bluesky is “hey, here’s a cool
thing”, like the great SQLite repl litecli, or
the fact that cross compiling in Go Just Works and it’s amazing, or
cryptographic right answers,
or this great diff tool. Usually I don’t want to write
a whole blog post about those things because I really don’t have much more to
say than “hey this is useful!”
It started to bother me that I didn’t have anywhere to put those things: for
example recently I wanted to use diffdiff and I just
could not remember what it was called.
the solution: make a new section of this blog
So I quickly made a new folder called /til/, added some
custom styling (I wanted to style the posts to look a little bit like a tweet),
made a little Rake task to help me create new posts quickly (rake new_til), and
set up a separate RSS Feed for it.
I think this new section of the blog might be more for myself than anything,
now when I forget the link to Cryptographic Right Answers I can hopefully look
it up on the TIL page. (you might think “julia, why not use bookmarks??” but I
have been failing to use bookmarks for my whole life and I don’t see that
changing ever, putting things in public is for whatever reason much easier for
me)
So far it’s been working, often I can actually just make a quick post in 2
minutes which was the goal.
inspired by Simon Willison’s TIL blog
My page is inspired by Simon Willison’s great TIL blog, though my TIL posts are a lot shorter.
I don’t necessarily want everything to be archived
This came about because I spent a lot of time on Twitter, so I’ve been thinking
about what I want to do about all of my tweets.
I keep reading the advice to “POSSE” (“post on your own site, syndicate
elsewhere”), and while I find the idea appealing in principle, for me part of
the appeal of social media is that it’s a little bit ephemeral. I can
post polls or questions or observations or jokes and then they can just kind of
fade away as they become less relevant.
I find it a lot easier to identify specific categories of things that I actually
want to have on a Real Website That I Own:
blog posts here!
comics at https://wizardzines.com/comics/!
now TILs at https://jvns.ca/til/)
and then let everything else be kind of ephemeral.
I really believe in the advice to make email lists though – the first two
(blog posts & comics) both have email lists and RSS feeds that people can
subscribe to if they want. I might add a quick summary of any TIL posts from
that week to the “blog posts from this week” mailing list.