The Evolution of Asides

For some reason or another I was searching email archives and ran into a ‘brain note’ I sent myself in early 2005 that linked to an article on coding ‘asides’ into your WordPress blog using a combination of a plugin and a bunch of custom code.

I remember being in love with the various link log formats that sites like Kottke had setup at the time and I remember specifically copy and pasting Matt’s code from his post that coined the term ‘asides’. Experiences like this really got me thinking about how software worked and what blogging was.

It’s great that 7 years later it has become obvious that not every post needs to follow one format and that in order for someone to post something in the format they want, no crazy code wrangling is necessary. The evolution of this seems natural, which is the best way, and thinking about how asides happened goes hand in hand with articles like Om Malik’s Blogging Reinvented.

We’re all still figuring out the best way to display the information we want to share while not ignoring the information we want to keep private. At the same time we’re creating more information every day than we ever have. Fortunately, the way things go, we’ll all keep stumbling through this together (some shouting loudly) and look back in another 7 years at how cool everything turned out.

If you run into this post and you’re thinking of fun ways to display information, send me an email or a tweet. I’m projecteuring a bunch right now and ideas are fun.