Something else that I decided to do for 2026 is write one post per day. This is turning out to be more of an average as opposed to a single post every day because frankly, there's been a few days this year that I just couldn't write anything good.
Before this change my posts were a mix of longer posts describing a project in detail (often step-by-step) or posts that were a single photo or a couple lines of text. As I embarked on this one-post-a-day journey I noticed some changes in my writing here.
The first thing that became clear was that long, detailed, heavily-edited posts were not likely to fit into the limited time I have to write each day and I had to quickly abandon the standards I had when it came to writing those. What was more of a surprise is that the posts that would have been short notes became longer, because when I relaxed my standards for writing more, I found that I could write more freely about thoughts and ideas that were not fully-formed or realized with a project or experiment, etc. I also cut myself some slack on proof or references, not that I can't produce these but I'm leaving that for more formal documents like project plans, code repositories, etc.
Now that I'm into the third month of writing like this a unique (at least to me) and somewhat consistent form is beginning to emerge. It's shorter and looser than what I'd consider an essay or a blog, but it's more than a tweet or a toot (microblogging), so let's call it a miniblog.
This is of course a reference to the often overlooked class of computers called "minicomputers", which are loosely defined as "smaller than a mainframe, bigger than a microcomputer".
The PDP-8, one of the most iconic minicomputers
I'm sure I'm not the first person to use the term miniblog but without having even done a web search it's not a term I've heard used before, and as a term for the form that is evolving here, it's a very nice fit for the Preposter.us blog system.
I wrote Preposter.us for a lot of reasons, almost entirely personal, so it fits the way I want to work very well but I will admit that there were times in the past where it's workflow gave me some headaches when working on longer, detailed posts that would have benefited from more editing, structure, formatting and tighter control over how media is integrated into the layout. Writing like that pushes Preposter.us out of it's comfort zone and it becomes less fun.
At the other end of the spectrum, "microblog" posts are so small that Preposter.us's automatic formatting leaves much to be desired. Two sentences don't really need a two or three-column layout, and I'm not good enough with CSS to fix that.
But in-between those extremes Preposter.us really shines!
Over the years I've daydreamed about making Preposter.us better and finding an audience for it who would make it a project that might help me get out from under the boot of the tech industry. While I've met some people who "get it", I've had a hard time articulating why it's an alternative to the heavy-duty blogging systems like Wordpress or Ghost or the microblogging platforms like Mastodon.
This realization of the form that I'm deveoping in 2026 and the term miniblogging might be a piece of that puzzle.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026