I read a lot of articles and blogs (or at least a lot of headlines) and recently a couple blogs captured my attention. The first was a blog post from Jonathan Snook about blogging approach and guiding principles, On Approach.

That post itself referenced another blog by Tracy Durnell on Guiding Principles.

These two blog posts remind me of a thing I like to do when creating a new D&D campaign setting. I create a list of "5 things you need to know about...campaign world", kind of like a campaign bible. The list then forms an introduction to the setting, and really sets the tone and... guiding principles for the campaign. I have a very old unfinished website I maintain that showcases this, Adaris.

I think a statement of guiding principles would be good for my efforts here, so I'll be stealing the idea wholesale.

The second post is from Chris Coyer who, as with Jonathon Snook, I have been following and reading their work for a long time. He recently posted about Control. This article is about owning and publishing to your own site, a concept dear to my heart, and a guiding principle of this site. The article speaks about the challenges for the average user to blog or own and maintain their own site. The idea is that socials and platforms are much better suited to be easy to use and accessible to the average person. Easier to post on Instagram your ideas and thoughts, than to get invovled in an overly engineered home-rolled blog solution that no one sees or knows about. ;-) Which is valid, of course.

Personally, I have some skills to go my own way, so that is what I'll do.

POSSE

Mr. Coyer references POSSE. I actually had never seen the Indie Web site, so this was an interesting find. I've only just started to dive into the site, and it seems right up my alley, and thus right up this blog's alley. I expect the site will directly lead to more interesting work on the blog, so I'm pretty excited by this discovery. This may require flipping the site's concept on its head. Instead of being the aggregate of all these platforms, if I switch to a POSSE inspired format, then I would be building the tools to submit on this site first which then goes out to the respective platforms, like BlueSky or Hardcover.

It is nice to know there is a wider collection of weirdos out there that think like me. I will be looking into this further.

Up Next

Given all this I plan to revaluate my blog guiding principles, and blog about them. I will be doing a deep dive on POSSE and indieweb in general, which may effect the guiding principles as well. With the Hardcover, and TMDB workers, I am actual storing the data and will reference that instead of the live site. Thus storing and keeping the information I want. But with Blue Sky and Spotify, I was going to be much more direct. If I understand POSSE correctly, I may want to store those posts as well, so that if these platforms disappear, my content is still controlled by me.

TBD. Stay tuned.