When I first started working on this blog’s design I thought about building in a script that would automatically insert a blank post at the start of every day. That way, if I didn’t post, the website would fill up with blank lines. I hoped it might encourage regular posting to keep the lines from piling up. Now that my blog has been live for almost two months I feel stressed about how little I am able to keep up with daily or even weekly publishing. Even though I decided the blanks feature would be too cruel and stressful, I still feel the phantom presence of the lines and how many empty days keep going by.

To get out from under the clock pressure, I had the thought to remove the dates from these entries entirely. And actually I’ve been thinking about my practice of excessively adding dates, and sometimes even timestamps, to everything written in my life in general. I’m no longer convinced that it matters to so diligently keep track of time and I wonder if things appearing in chronological order is enough of a structure, or could even link disparate ideas into a single stream.

My issue with undated entries is that I like having permalinks and I like the permalinks to be a dynamic variable. Not every post has a title so the date becomes a fallback title. I guess I have to admit that my use of dates is purely aesthetic for the “data look” and that’s enough of a reason to keep using them? I’m coming to terms with it.

After typing all this out, now I want to implement the blanks script after all lol.