One of my 2025 resolutions is doing things that don’t scale and doing them faster without overthinking. The idea is to focus on doing more while worrying less about scalability and sustainability in the things I do outside of work. With that in mind, I’ve been thinking for a while about tracking some of my out-of-band activities on this blog. The goal is to:
- List the things I do, books and articles I read, and talks I grok.
- Add some commentary or quote something I liked from the content, verbatim, for posterity.
- Not spam people who just want to read the regular articles.
- Not turn into a content junkie, churning out slop I wouldn’t want to read myself.
This isn’t about getting more eyeballs on what I publish. It’s about tracking what I do so I can look back at the end of the year and enjoy a nice little lull of accomplishment. Plus, having a place to post stuff regularly nudges me to read more, explore more, and do more of the things I actually want to do.
Social media is usually where people do this, but digging up old posts and reviewing them later is a pain. Plus, platforms like Twitter tank your posts’ visibility if they have links to other sites. A simple link blog solves all that for me.
Having a dynamic site with a backend would make setting up a link blog trivial. But I’m too lazy to maintain a fancy dynamic site, even though this blog gets an okay-ish amount of traffic. This blog is just a static artifact1 generated by Hugo with a minimalistic theme and some custom CSS flair. Adding a link blog without a backend is tricky when I want to avoid dealing with a dedicated backend.
If you don’t mind maintaining a dynamic site, Simon Willison has a great piece2 on how he handles his link blog.
Here’s what has worked for me
I went with a dead simple approach that has worked for me for the past 5 months:
- Detail view: Have a single markdown page dedicated to each year and add the links there3.
- List view: Cluster the detail pages in a list view named “feed” 4.
Detail view
Each year gets its own detail page where I add links in reverse chronological order. The content has the following structure in markdown:
---
title: "2024"
layout: post
---
### December 26
#### [Reflecting on life – Armin Ronacher][32]
...
[32]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/12/26/reflecting-on-life/
---
### December 24
#### [How I write HTTP services in Go after 13 years – Mat Ryer][31]
...
[31]: https://grafana.com/blog/2024/02/09/how-i-write-http-services/
---
Hugo renders the detail view like this:
List view
I use the Papermod theme for this site, and it automatically creates a list view from the yearly pages.
To avoid spamming people, the entries in the link blog are filtered out of the main RSS feed. Also, the client-side search functionality allows me to look for a particular link without having to maintain any extra infra.
This solution is simple and has been working well for me. I started it in August last year, and the 2024 page5 already has enough entries to make me feel good when I reviewed them at the end of the year.
Recent posts
- Running only a single instance of a process
- Function types and single-method interfaces in Go
- SSH saga
- Injecting Pytest fixtures without cluttering test signatures
- Explicit method overriding with @typing.override
- Quicker startup with module-level __getattr__
- Docker mount revisited
- Topological sort
- Writing a circuit breaker in Go
- Discovering direnv