In The joy of incremental website improvements, I reflected on the idea of building personal websites incrementally:

Making incremental improvements to one's personal website is a joy. Your site can evolve at your own pace, and as you learn. You don't need to set out with a grand ambition.

This website has been built over time, incrementally. The design, themes about which I write, links in the navigation bar – all have evolved with time. As I grow, so too does my website.

In some of my recent blog posts – this one included – I have been more explicitly building on ideas I have written about in the past, consulting my blog archive to find related posts and referencing a relevant quote.

For example, the direction of “How software feels” was informed by a quote I found in my archives about design. I noticed that I was using the word “feel” back in 2024 related to software, even though my focus then was more on the concept of delight in software. In this way, “How software feels” builds on what came before, while being directed by new thoughts and ideas.

This has me thinking about my site archives as a place that is alive, a place where there are ideas upon which I can build, or at the very least use for reference.

The idea of site archives being “alive” is inspired by what I have been learning about history in school. Our understanding of the past is informed by what questions historians ask. With time – and societal changes that come with it – historians have the opportunity to ask different questions. New questions may help us build a different impression of times in the past. By extension, new questions and ideas may give me the fuel I need to build on an idea in the past.

Sometimes I think about how blogs, generally, emphasise new posts in their design. Indeed, my most recent essays are prominently placed on my site home page. On reflection, chronology is part of the fabric of blogging. With that said, as I write I find myself looking back on my archives for resources relevant to what I am thinking about today. The archive is more than a list of posts. It is a repository of my ideas. [1]

My website feels like a place where I can have a dialogue between my past and present ideas.

I am curious if anyone has any practices around more actively using one’s archives as part of writing, or if anyone else has done any thinking on the concept of “the archive.” If you have any comments, please send me an email!

This very blog post is one I expect to develop over time. I haven’t yet developed a clear image in my mind of what “the archive” and blog archives mean to me – this is the start of my documentation around this idea. I wanted to give the idea a link both to share it and so that I have my thoughts written down and stowed away, ready for reference when inspiration strikes.

[1]: Related: Being able to search my archives helps immeasurably in finding resources to build on.