On Approach
I came across these Guiding Principles for my website and it has me thinking what my principles or tenets or guiding lights might be for my own site.
The initial tagline for my site was “tips, tricks, and bookmarks on web development”. I like to think that described the site rather well. Casual but professional, where even the personal posts were more often than not about professional matters like going freelance or getting a new job.
With an explicit shift into considering this a personal blog, I changed the tagline to the “life & times of a web developer”, which perhaps implies web development more than it does life, but c’est la vie.
Guiding Lights
So, what guides what I write here? Using Tracy’s principles as a jumping-off point…
1. Be friendly and kind
I believe I’ve done just that over the years and intend to keep it that way. I invite conversation but I’ve chosen not to have those conversations on my site. Maintaining comments had turned into a hassle with 99% of them being spam. Each article in my RSS feed has a link to send me an email. (Perhaps I should add the same to each page on the site.)
2. Be open (and closed)
Share where it may be of value to others. I share my perspective in hopes of enriching others. I learn from others—perhaps others can learn from me. That doesn’t mean every detail gets shared—especially of my personal life. I desire to protect the people I care about. While I may talk of my friends and family, it’s generally done in vague terms.
One thing that I will start doing is being more explicit about asking permission before sharing. Photos taken in public spaces where the people are unidentified feels like a grey area, though. While most of my public photography doesn’t include people, sometimes it happens. I don’t want to inadvertently be adding them to some facial recognition database somewhere. I’ll be consciously thinking about this going forward.
3. Be playful
This site has always been a playground for myself—from way back in the day playing with fixed positioning to researching the ins and outs of various CSS properties to learning about different technology.
While I haven’t redesigned this site in a long time, I’ve been using subdomains for playing with ideas and stretching my creative muscles. It’s always been fun to explore different topics and see what I can pull off technically.
4. Reach isn’t important
There’s no analytics. I’m not trying to drive a bunch of traffic to the site and posting it on Hacker News or Reddit or whatever. There no posting schedule, optimizing for when people are most likely to read and share. Posting is random and it can be consumed at will.
5. Keep it informal
I write about what I want to write about and how I want to write about it. I might be wrong about something. I have biases. I am human. I am imperfect. My writing might be informal but I rarely cuss and I don’t see that changing. I don’t use emojis. Historically, it was because encoding was a hassle. Now, it’s because emojis render differently and may give a different meaning than intended depending on the platform or even depending on what generation you’re from. (Thumbs up emoji gang here.)
6. Use it for good
In a general sense, I’ve tried to do that and in that general sense, I believe I have succeeded.
From a political standpoint, I’ve been quiet and perhaps even a coward. It’s been easy to hide behind the idea that this is a tech blog and not a political one but as we’ve seen, tech is political. It’s difficult to use or talk about different platforms without acknowledging the ethical and non-ethical uses of those platforms.
I am progressive and believe in caring for people. I don’t have any party affiliations. I don’t believe political parties should be treated like a sports team. I believe in human rights and that includes everybody, regardless of gender or sex.
One of the reasons I’ve moved to publishing more of my content on my own sites is because I don’t want to associate with platforms that are money and power hungry, abusing algorithms and advertising. I also don’t want to abandon friends and lose connections because those platforms are the places where they live.
Keep Evolving
These six guidelines are just that. They’re not hard rules. They’re just ways that I am thinking about how I express myself, both here and on social media.