Jamie Thingelstad

I’ve been curating my blog for a couple of years now using a method I call Blog Gardening. I continue to garden my blog each day. It is a great way to tend to the archive of posts I’ve created over more than twenty years and gives me a moment of nostalgia in my day that often brings a smile to my day. It is pretty common that I share a memory from gardening with my family.

I’ve been pondering a blog activity that is less common for me but is another way to curate my blog. There are times when life is busy, or I lack connectivity to the web, or who knows why but something that I would have blogged about goes without a blog post. A common situation for me involves video which requires more bandwidth than I have when we are traveling. What to do when I find these notable historical gaps in my blog?

I can of course create a blog post with whatever date I want and have an opportunity to fill a gap when able. Micro.blog itself supports scheduling a post in the future which you can “misuse” and schedule a post in the past — it works great¹. You can use an app like MarsEdit to create a post with any timestamp you wish.

What to call creating posts from the past? It made me think of Harry Potter and the Pensieve.

A Pensieve was a very rare and powerful magical item. They were a magical device used to store and review memories.

Blog Pensieve it is! Love it.

For me Pensieve posts are anchored in my Photo Library. My photos have a clear history of visual events and critically also have location and timestamp information. Together these photos give the important metadata needed to “populate the pensieve”. The most important part to get right for a pensieve post is the timestamp! And when you are traveling in different timezones this may take some careful consideration.

And a great bonus about this is that these Pensieve posts will now populate in your Blog Gardening!

Here are some Blog Pensieve posts that I’ve created. I’ve also decided as a technical matter to have these in a Pensieve category.

• Dettifoss
• Selfoss
• Cannon Lake Flooded and Boat Floats Away

I also use the schedule feature to create posts from a day or two ago. I don’t consider these Pensieve posts. They are really just me catching up on some things. I probably created a task in OmniFocus to post it. Pensieve posts are for going back in time, dipping into those gaps, and adding to my blog for the future.

I like the term Pensieve too because just like in Harry Potter, too much of it could be dangerous:

Pensieves were rare because only the most advanced wizards ever use them, and because the majority of wizardkind is afraid of doing so.

With great power, comes great responsibility.