New Website and blog
In addition to the content I’m posting on Substack and YouTube, I’ve decided in 2026 to once again own and control my presence on the internet, by having my own website. I’m not going to stop posting on SubStack or YouTube, and I’m not even going to set up my own server and host my own pages. But I am going to get my own domain again, rent server space, and have my own thing.
In honor of a very cool idea I discovered in my book club recently, I’m going to call it Zibaldone.net after the Florentine notebooks that became popular in the mid-fourteenth century (described in Roland Allen’s 2024 book, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper).
I’ve used WordPress before, but it will probably take me some time to refamiliarize myself with it. I’m not 100% sure it is the ultimate tool, since I’d really like to be developing a massively-linked collection of posts. But I suspect there are a lot of things I can do in WordPress that I’m not yet aware of. So I’ll explore and experiment a bit.
One of the things I want to do with a blog/website is to link much more extensively than I’ve done before on Substack. An impediment to that was the interface, which felt very much like a magazine, with only the most current things featured. Even on my own homepage. The other problem, which I contributed to making, was the subscription paywall that I put up, on content more than a month old. This, I had hoped, would encourage people to contribute. In reality, I probably didn’t put enough effort into the linking that would have shown them WHY they would want to go back beyond the paywall and read the linked content.
Another contributor to the confusion (also my fault) was my own relative inability to distinguish between random, bloggy posts and more project-oriented posts that formed part of a series. I’m not 100% sure how I’ll do that in WordPress, either. I suspect, because WordPress focuses a lot on “Categories” and “Tags”, that will be part of the solution. Also, direct linking between posts, which I’ll need to do manually but which I can take direction from the bidirectional links a lot of these ideas already have, in my Obsidian vault of notes.
But since this will be a zibaldone, or a notebook of my reflections, it will retain a bloggish element too. So there will be some serendipity in what pops up, on any given day. A walk through the forest of ideas I’ve collected. Some days purposeful, some days more random.