---
title: New microblog with TILs
link: https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/09/new-microblog/
source: jvns-ca
published: 2024-11-09T09:24:29Z
updated: 2024-11-09T09:24:29Z
first_seen: 2026-09-19T21:30:23.395188495Z
content: extracted
html: 2024-11-09-new-microblog-with-tils.html
---

I added a new section to this site a couple weeks ago called [TIL](https://jvns.ca/til/) (“today I learned”).

One kind of thing I like to post on Mastodon/Bluesky is “hey, here’s a cool thing”, like [the great SQLite repl litecli](https://github.com/dbcli/litecli), or the fact that cross compiling in Go Just Works and it’s amazing, or [cryptographic right answers](https://www.latacora.com/blog/2018/04/03/cryptographic-right-answers/), or [this great diff tool](https://diffdiff.net/). Usually I don’t want to write a whole blog post about those things because I really don’t have much more to say than “hey this is useful!”

It started to bother me that I didn’t have anywhere to put those things: for example recently I wanted to use [diffdiff](https://diffdiff.net/) and I just could not remember what it was called.

### [the solution: make a new section of this blog](https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/09/new-microblog/#the-solution-make-a-new-section-of-this-blog)

So I quickly made a new folder called [/til/](https://jvns.ca/til/), added some custom styling (I wanted to style the posts to look a little bit like a tweet), made a little Rake task to help me create new posts quickly (`rake new_til`), and set up a separate RSS Feed for it.

I think this new section of the blog might be more for myself than anything, now when I forget the link to Cryptographic Right Answers I can hopefully look it up on the TIL page. (you might think “julia, why not use bookmarks??” but I have been failing to use bookmarks for my whole life and I don’t see that changing ever, putting things in public is for whatever reason much easier for me)

So far it’s been working, often I can actually just make a quick post in 2 minutes which was the goal.

### [inspired by Simon Willison’s TIL blog](https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/09/new-microblog/#inspired-by-simon-willison-s-til-blog)

My page is inspired by [Simon Willison’s great TIL blog](https://til.simonwillison.net/), though my TIL posts are a lot shorter.

### [I don’t necessarily want everything to be archived](https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/09/new-microblog/#i-don-t-necessarily-want-everything-to-be-archived)

This came about because I spent a lot of time on Twitter, so I’ve been thinking about what I want to do about all of my tweets.

I keep reading the advice to “POSSE” (“post on your own site, syndicate elsewhere”), and while I find the idea appealing in principle, for me part of the appeal of social media is that it’s a little bit ephemeral. I can post polls or questions or observations or jokes and then they can just kind of fade away as they become less relevant.

I find it a lot easier to identify specific categories of things that I actually want to have on a Real Website That I Own:

- blog posts here!
- comics at [https://wizardzines.com/comics/](https://wizardzines.com/comics/)!
- now TILs at [https://jvns.ca/til/](https://jvns.ca/til/))

and then let everything else be kind of ephemeral.

I really believe in the advice to make email lists though – the first two (blog posts & comics) both have email lists and RSS feeds that people can subscribe to if they want. I might add a quick summary of any TIL posts from that week to the “blog posts from this week” mailing list.