How to use a personal website to enhance your ability to think and create?

A few thoughts follow below. Let's begin with a few of the more important principles, plus a few miscellanea that don't really belong later in the essay. Some of this is repeated later in the essay.

• The purpose of the site is to help me think well1. This purpose is in opposition to many widely-used norms in online writing. I suspect that the possibl

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Obstacles to fluent writing

• Any variation on: “I can't say that!”


• “What if people think I'm stupid?”


• “What if people think this is boring?”


• “What if people think I'm ignorant?”


• “What if people think I'm trying to be superior?”


• “What if this isn't good enough?”


• “What if sharing my ideas results in my being scooped?”


• “Is this part of my job?”


• The vague worri

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What and how do you write a personal site with the long-term in mind?... What sort of writing could you create if you worked on it (be it ever so rarely) for the next 60 years?

There's something strangely difficult in writing just for oneself. As far as I can tell, almost no-one can do it productively9:10. We think better when the stakes are higher, and one of the best ways of raising the stakes is to make a document into something you're sharing with people whose good opinion you desire. Even just sharing with one such p... See more

One trouble with blogging is that people subscribe to the blog , rather than each post finding its own audience. This encourages lowest common denominator writing. In particular it creates a context in which depth is penalized