Updated Blog Structure

After some thought, I decided to restructure my blog. I realized that I occasionally want to share some small updates—a book or an article that I would like to recommend, a new paper of mine, or an announcement like this one (meta, right?). But it did not seem right to put it together with all of my other writing which up until now I considered to be what my blog would all be about. Therefore, I decided to split my blog into two sections: ‘Essays’ and ‘Updates’.

‘Essays’ will contain my long-form writing that I put some effort into, i.e. things I have been putting on this website up until now. For some reason, the word ’essay’ always sounded very pretentious to me, but that’s what a lot of people whom I respect call their pieces of writing on their own websites, so I guess I will stick with it.

‘Updates’ will contain quick updates or generally just a less formal kind of writing. I envision these as tweets (sometimes longer than 280 characters), just on my website.

When moving to the new structure, I wanted to avoid breaking anything. Specifically, I wanted the old URLs to work (and ideally redirect to updated URLs), and to ensure that my RSS feeds do not interpret old blog posts as new ones. Items in my RSS feeds use URLs as unique identifiers, which made me realize that this change could incorrectly notify the subscribers of those feeds about old posts because their URLs have changed. Thankfully, Hugo website generator (that I use to build my website) allowed me to address both of these issues and everything should work just fine. If you spot any strange behavior though, please let me know.