When I created my WordPress account and started writing, I thought odds were pretty good that I would write a handful of entries and stop. This is the fate of most blogs! But I managed to keep a pretty good pace going for several years. I increased my tempo as I went. Starting from once a week and gradually up to a daily rhythm.

The daily posting system was good for keeping me moving forward. And to keep it from becoming a huge burden, I gave myself the goal of keeping each entry short. My target has been around 250-300 words which has been enough to communicate a single idea from beginning to end. Turning this blog into a project diary with daily entries kept myself moving forward on projects, because I keep asking myself: “Am I doing something worthwhile enough to write about?” This doesn’t always prevent me from wasting my time, but it helped tremendously. The project diary has also turned into a valuable resource for myself: whenever I want to reference back to something I’ve done before, I can search on this site and remind myself what happened.

But unsurprisingly, I would tired of keeping up a daily pace. I fell off my rhythm several months ago and while a bit of a break is expected, I haven’t been able to pick it back up again. Most recently I wrote about R2S4, my spent spool storage system project, but only for a handful of entries before another long pause.

The daily format is also a problem when I want to reference back to some part of a project but I didn’t remember exactly which part. Larger projects are spread across multiple entries, and I had to flip through each of them looking for the nugget of information I wanted. This became a huge problem on my biggest teardown project to date, the Canon MX340 multi-function inkjet. I learned a ton as I went, but that meant information is scattered so widely I ended up creating an index page just so I could find stuff. This situation is frankly ridiculous.

I have continued to tinker with various projects, but I haven’t been writing them down here. This is starting to become a problem: it’s been several months and I’ve found myself wishing I had written down some details I have since forgotten. I need to revive this project notebook.

I will try writing longer posts, but not necessarily daily. This means information on moderate sized projects (Like the follow-up to R2S4) will all be on one page instead of scattered across a half dozen daily entries, making it easier for me to find information later. And when I make progress on an existing project, I may adding to the end of an existing page instead of creating a new daily entry. This means it’ll take more effort to find updates now that they’re buried. Is such chronological information useful to keep in my project notebook? It’s been my primarily organization hierarchy for so long I won’t really know until I try going without for a while.

I will still have the scattered data/scattered timeline problem for larger projects like Canon MX340, or longer-term projects like Sawppy rover. I will have to reevaluate later. For now, I want to see if an alternative approach will help improve documenting more of my work.