I have been blogging for nearly 20 years and have created thousands of blog posts in that time. I’ve hosted my blog on several platforms over the year, and my writing style has evolved over those decades. I have every intention of continuing to blog for the rest of my life. And in fact, will hope to have my blog last well beyond that.

As a long-term blogger though I’ve noticed that tending and curating my archive is both difficult due to the size, but also entirely satisfying and rewarding to do. I’ve come to think of this like digital gardening. You tend to the plants, pull the weeds, clean up things.

Once you’ve gotten past the hurdle of regularly posting on your site, I highly recommending taking 5-10 minutes each day to do some small thing to curate and improve your blog.


My gardening routine in OmniFocus.

Here is how I do it.

I visit my On This Day page every day. This is perfect for me as it divides the thousands of posts into 365 slices so I’m typically only gardening around ten to twenty posts. My gardening typically involves:

  • Fixing a typo in a post.
  • Cleaning up a hyperlink that is worded poorly or with a broken link.
  • I shouldn’t have broken images, but sometimes it happens and I fix those.
  • Sometimes a post lacks the context to understand it now, so I might add that.
  • There may be two short posts that would be better merged into one.
  • Adding a post to a Collection or a List, as well as adding a link to those in the post itself.
  • Adding links to other posts, particularly links to older posts to new ones that were written after the old one was published.

It makes me happy to make these small fixes. I bet it is like a gardener that pulls some weeds in their garden. My website will be some part of my legacy, and this small daily task makes that legacy a little bit better all the time.