Dries Buytaert

A few years ago, I quietly adopted a small principle that has changed how I think about publishing on my website. It's a principle I've been practicing for a while now, though I don't think I've ever written about it publicly.

The principle is: If a note can be public, it should be.

It sounds simple, but this idea has quietly shaped how I treat my personal website.

I was inspired by three overlapping ideas: digital gardens, personal memexes, and "Today I Learned" entries.

Writers like Tom Critchlow, Maggie Appleton, and Andy Matuschak maintain what they call digital gardens. They showed me that a personal website does not have to be a collection of polished blog posts. It can be a living space where ideas can grow and evolve. Think of it more as an ever-evolving notebook than a finished publication, constantly edited and updated over time.

I also learned from Simon Willison, who publishes small, focused Today I Learned (TIL) entries. They are quick, practical notes that capture a moment of learning. They don't aim to be comprehensive; they simply aim to be useful.

And then there is Cory Doctorow. In 2021, he explained his writing and publishing workflow, which he describes as a kind of personal memex. A memex is a way to record your knowledge and ideas over time. While his memex is not public, I found his approach inspiring.

I try to take a lot of notes. For the past four years, my tool of choice has been Obsidian. It is where I jot things down, think things through, and keep track of what I am learning.

In Obsidian, I maintain a Zettelkasten system. It is a method for connecting ideas and building a network of linked thoughts. It is not just about storing information but about helping ideas grow over time.

At some point, I realized that many of my notes don't contain anything private. If they're useful to me, there is a good chance they might be useful to someone else too. That is when I adopted the principle: If a note can be public, it should be.

So a few years ago, I began publishing these kinds of notes on my site. You might have seen examples like Principles for life, PHPUnit tests for Drupal, Brewing coffee with a moka pot when camping or Setting up password-free SSH logins.

These pages on my website are not blog posts. They are living notes. I update them as I learn more or come back to the topic. To make that clear, each note begins with a short disclaimer that says what it is. Think of it as a digital notebook entry rather than a polished essay.

Now, I do my best to follow my principle, but I fall short more than I care to admit. I have plenty of notes in Obsidian that could have made it to my website but never did.

Often, it's simply inertia. Moving a note from Obsidian to my Drupal site involves a few steps. While not difficult, these steps consume time I don't always have. I tell myself I'll do it later, and then 'later' often never arrives.

Other times, I hold back because I feel insecure. I am often most excited to write when I am learning something new, but that is also when I know the least. What if I misunderstood something? The voice of doubt can be loud enough to keep a note trapped in Obsidian, never making it to my website.

But I keep pushing myself to share in public. I have been learning in the open and sharing in the open for 25 years, and some of the best things in my life have come from that. So I try to remember: if notes can be public, they should be.