Function Follows Form?

“Updates are scarce, interestingness is in decline, posts become shorter.”

Those could be the symptoms of a blog that’s in the process of being abandoned. While that is not the case with NDNL, updates have been scarce, interestingness etc.

You get the point.

True, work has been a killer lately. Yesterday, and the day before, saw 12-hour workdays because of a looming deadline. Things are getting better, though, as the work on a new site of ours is nearing its first stage of completion.

Added to that, I haven’t been feeling too well. Mentally and physically, the past two weeks have been hard. But since I hate personal avowals, I’ll let my Morale-O-Meter speak for itself:

However, after discovering Zen Habits, I was particularly taken in with 8 Tricks to Turn the Bad into the Awesome.

When I read the introduction, I momentarily felt the post had been written just for me:

Your schedule gets all messed up. You fail to follow your exercise plan. Someone is mean to you (or you to them, ed.) You feel like quitting something. You want to curl into a little ball and cry.

Well, maybe not cry, but still. Sucky things make you feel all uck, right?

Then, today, I came across Khoi Vinh’s Allow Me Not to Explain Myself.

Granted, I’m not experiencing any technical difficulties, but the idea made a lot of sense to me: that sometimes you “could blog all day every day”, whereas other times you couldn’t get a post out if your life “depended on it”.

Added to that, I feel some of the same frustration Khoi does about the form of his blog:

There is something about its presentation — the way the front page looks and the way it leads into the article page — that makes it very hard to do anything but publish articles — and therefore to blog anything that doesn’t take the form of an expository essay.

Now, I don’t consider NDNL to be anywhere near where Subtraction is, either in quality, articulateness or design.

But the current setup of this site does echo that of Khoi’s and so I fully subscribe to the idea that form can be determining in function. Perhaps, if I went back to a more classic design, things might be different.

So, who knows? Does presentation define how or what you write? Do you get stuck in restraints that you’ve imposed yourself before? And when in a rut, can you get out of it by changing style alone, not the essence?

I suppose that last one is a “no”. Or we’d all be who we wanted to without ever making an effort, right?

Tags: blogging, content, morale, style