The blog cycle

I just read Shane Friedman's account of creating his "new" blog.

Of course it is the Grand Destiny of any blog to be rebuilt from scratch at about the same cadence as people get new phones. And no, I'm not particularly itching to do that with this digital garden.

But when I read about how he wants to author posts in HTML, I was kind of grossed out. I love Markdown because what I'm authoring is mostly text, and I don't want to deal with any HTML elements. My templates remain templates, my content remains content, and when the content needs to go into the templates it gets rendered (which I am, I think appropriately, totally picturing in the sense of the term "meat rendering").

Then I thought about how this medium might be limiting me. I tell myself "My build system makes it hard to include images in posts, but that's okay I don't use images". But can't you just flip that around and say "I don't use images because my build system makes it hard to include images in posts"? I especially thought it was cool, in his setup, that he could definite reusable custom components that he could place into different articles.

Of course, just because I have a vague feeling that I want to include more images in my garden nodes, it doesn't mean that I actually have image content to include in such nodes. The best I could probably come up with are screenshots for nodes that maybe explain some concept or otherwise discuss software I've built. And what would I use a custom HTML element for anyways?

I think my digital garden could be more "multimedia", definitely, but I'd have to think more about what that would mean in practice.