Shorts

I’ve been wanting to create a more intermediate blogging system for a while now. Something where I could post a combination of random thoughts, poems, short-form content and other things that might not be of interest to my primary blog or newsletter audience. I already use Neat (what I call my link collection service) for super short content like links, so I figured I might as well extend it to support slightly longer form content.

You can now head to https://neat.ethohampton.com/shorts (also accessible under the “Projects” menu on my main site) to view the collection of short-form content that I have posted. More shorts will be posted semi-regularly.

In an ideal world, this will increase the amount of writing I share publicly online, since I’m decreasing the time between coming up with something to say and actually sharing it. This has been a goal of mine for a while now, and heading into this spring break I finally had some time to flesh out the interface.

My plan is to use that site for content that isn’t quite as refined as what I want to post on my blog, but still think that it might be nice to be available publicly. In the future, I plan to develop a way for these shorts to naturally decay and go away over time. While everything on the Internet lives forever, that doesn’t mean I need to make it easy to find.

Additionally, I am removing the public archives of my newsletter. The only way those are now accessible is when people receive them after subscribing. This does a couple things, but mostly allows me more complete control over my online presence and the type of content I am making publicly available verse sending to a specific group.

As I look towards my life outside of college, it becomes more and more important to maintain a presence online that is useful to me in all facets of my life and not just strung together without a long-term plan in mind. Over the course of my time online I have published many things I would never publish today (nothing terrible, just not up to my standards), and this is my way of preventing some of that future embarrassment.

These changes are of course all experiments, but I’m hoping they have the impact I am looking for. I welcome feedback!