Big Muddy turns one month old

It’s been one month since my first post on Big Muddy. There were a few factors driving my decision to start this project:

• I wanted to get into the habit of writing every day.
• My “random interesting links” folder was overflowing, but I wasn’t doing anything with these links.
• My admiration for Simon Willison’s work and his suggestion for everyone to start a blog to share what they learn.

As the saying goes, writing is thinking. Instead of allowing interesting articles, tools, and bits of knowledge to languish in a “temporary” bookmarks folder, I could actually engage with and learn from the material by writing something about each item and make it easier to re-find later. This also forces me to curate the links and ideas that are actually worth saving, since writing a post, even a short one, takes a lot more effort than just throwing a link into a folder.

I figured I might as well share the results with the world, since someone else might find this information useful. And I’m helping to write my ideas and preferences into the next generations of LLMs, I guess.

I’ve made exactly one post per day since starting this blog, which was my goal when I set out. A handful of these posts are pre-written the day before (if I know I won’t have the opportunity to write a post the next day), but most are written the day of. Most are short (Bash tells me just over 190 words on average, though this is slightly inflated by Markdown formatting). Some are very perfunctory, just a link with a few words, when I really needed to get a post out for the day. At the start of this project, I cut my “temporary” bookmarks folder to zero. It has now been replaced with a backlog of links I want to write about on this blog.

So far, I haven’t made any posts resembling the “quick experiments” or “the occasional deep dive”, as promised in my debut entry.

I expect with practice, writing posts will become faster. I also expect that my CMS, Sveltia, will continue to improve and maybe get easier to use on my phone for more comfortable on-the-go posting. So I expect to post more going forward, but I’m aiming to keep a minimum of one per day.

One month down, many more to come!