the two-layer post directory
last modified 3 weeks, 2 days ago
Originally written on September 10th, 2025. So I renovated my blog recently and uh... you ever think about "blog post lists?"
Has this ever happened to you?: you find a blog on the discovery tab, and then you think the post you found is cool. And so you click on the blog and think, let's try and play catchup—and boom. Five billion entries. Completely disorganized, too, so you don't know where to start or what any of them are, only what their titles are...
And I think that works out fine for other people's blogs. I don't really mind choosing between catching up and not reading five billion entries, because my answer is an easy one (I'm not catching up! I'm just jumping aboard!). But I was kind of annoyed that there wasn't any path to follow through my blog, like there could be for a digital garden.
Like, I have some posts that I think are highlights of my blog. Not universal highlights, just personal ones, the things I'm happiest about having written. But they got kinda lost in the sea of anything else I thought worthy of uploading on here. And I didn't really want to delete or archive the other stuff, because I mean, I still like it, I like having it up... but y'know, it hasn't earnt its place of honor, has it?
So I set something up. Right now, instead of a directory of all my posts, my blog has a link to a "logbook". That logbook has a list of every post I've tagged as a highlight, and then at the bottom it links to my full post archive1.
And I also decided to go back and edit all my undiscoverable posts to have their names in parenthesis, so people can tell at a glance it's undiscoverable. I use undiscoverable posts for little status updates, links, etc... This sort of thing.
And I think this method has made blogging a lot more fun for me, because now I don't really feel obligated to make all my posts "of a certain level of quality". I have a space where I can shitpost, and it's not archived right next to the stuff I'm actually proud of. And that incentivizes me both to shitpost and to make quality stuff!!
I dunno, I'm sharing this blog post because I like this method. If you're like me and have kind of a mixed bag of a blog, I can definitely recommend taking a few minutes to implement this, or (if you need something more specific) taking an afternoon or two to tailor it to your liking. It might feel silly to waste all that time dicking with your blog, but if it makes you feel better about what you're writing and sharing and posting, I think it's worth the investment!
I like that bearblog's simplicity means I can figure out solutions to my own problems like this one. I think the DIY vibe is really cool, and it allows for a slower growth of your little webbed site. I sometimes wish for more tools, and I have some notes about stuff I'd like to see added to the site, but I'm pretty shy about sharing them, because even I don't know how they'd upset the balance of the web service, and like, I'm not the person running it!! (and, also... shouldn't I be posting them to the place where people submit feature ideas? Someday I'll get around to making a proposal, I've never done that so I dunno what it entails but I can see...)
well, that's about it for this blog post. I'm probably going to queue it to post in a week or so, since I don't actually have that many highlights (two, at the time of writing) and I wanna get at least one more out the door before publicly posting about this change.
I'd like to make a guide post someday to some solutions I've found to bearblog problems I don't have. I like thinking about how tools like these could be applied, which I hardly think is a rare quality lol, and I think maybe other people would find it useful? I've def found useful the tutorials other people have shared on how to do this and that with bearblog. (someday I might set up a way to microblog on this site...) and so maybe contributing myself could be fun. It could be enriching!! I dunno; suddenly such a small change makes everything so exciting.
Also hey I ended up queueing the post to go live like, 45 minutes before I have an exam, so wish me luck on that if you're here early. Okay, that's all for reals now. And as always,
thank you for reading!!
Which is also a custom page with a post list, 'cuz I wanted to show off my meta descriptions.↩