An tag on a post in the list denotes that this post is not quite finished, but is more than a hidden, unpublished draft. For one reason or another, I want that post to be visible in its current state.

The end-game plan for this approach is to divide a post up between its finished parts and its developing parts.
The finished section would be a stand-alone, conceptually-complete article while the developing section would house everything from stream of consciousness spit-balling to nicely-organized outlines.
Bits would migrate from the developing area to the finished area as I get less dumb and more motivated regarding the topic at hand.

As it stands now, on August 6th, 2018, I’m publishing all my half-baked drafts, as posts but I’m not yet doing the surgical division between finished/developing. Some of the evolving posts are outlined and going in a good direction, others are pretty loose stream of consciousness, still others are totally empty with just a title and the occasional apology.

Now, keeping with tradition, here’s the way this page used to look:

Read me first: I guess you probably would have (read it first) anyway since its on top, but either way I’m glad we’re both here now.
The plan that follows isn’t yet enacted on this site. This is a live/visible page anyway, in the spirit of making pages live and visible (rather than secret, unpublished, shameful drafts, the likes of which number in the dozens in the shadows of this website). You’ll know this new directive is being carried out just as soon as this site becomes overpopulated with half-baked, rambling drafts whose desperate clawing towards viable-outside-the-womb organelle++ status will be broadcast in real(ish) time for your voyeuristic pleasure.
Ok, now on to the page as it stood before I wrote this weird intro… This is now live.

Perhaps I should write a conceptually complete and neat stub of each draft and publish them as such, with the disclaimer that more is coming.

for example, if this post were one such stub it would look like this:

Finishedy parts

expanding stub articles

The articles on this blog are ever-evolving as I get less stupid and lazy. What that means is each article has a “finishedy parts” and a “comingy parts”. The former being a - maybe small-ish hopefully growing - public-ready stand-alone writing on the topic at hand. the latter would contain all the bits of “coming soon” ideas and directions I’d like to further flesh out.
As I get less stupid on a topic, or less lazy on a topic about which I am already less stupid, I would expand on the “coming soon” bits and move them up into the “finishedy parts” piece by piece until the thing is “done”.

The purpose would be multi-fold:

Get more articles up on the site.
When someone comes here, they’d get an idea of the types of things I’m interested in and where I generally stand on them. Given a limited population of ideas it can seem like those are the important ones rather than just the ones that got written about so far. A lot of my drafts are longer than the currently-published posts.
Have an interesting angle for a blog. Let readers see my thought process a little bit.

Comingy parts

write more about the additional purposes to this approach
come up with better names and/or formats for the finished/coming bits. Maybe some UX that hides the coming part by default or something.
- maybe a link at the bottom of the published article to its _drafts/ counterpart. publish all _drafts/ in that case??
draft for a static page that describes this general approach. Whoa hey, that’d be this post, I guess?

I’m a bit worried that when I add bits to an already-published article I’ll be compelled to add footnotes about what was added and when, plus maybe why those bits were added (and why then… see the fractal recording post for more on this circus.) This naturally lends itself to some kind of update feed/rss/twitter bot, which could be fun to build, but also maybe crushingly pointless, given my nonexistent readership…

In Action, as of 2018-08-06

As it stands now, I’m publishing all my half-baked drafts, but I’m not yet doing this surgical “finished/coming” division and all this. Some of the evolving posts are outlined and going in a good direction, others are pretty loose stream of consciousness, still others are totally empty with just a title.