I try to make the best of the blogging environment, but I have always been fascinated by Jorn Barger's early-web idea of what he called “single-layer web design” — it's ironic that he is sometimes called the inventor of the weblog, because while he was one of the first to create a reverse-chronological list of links, that's pretty much all they were, links, not developed ideas. Almost all of his Robot Wisdom site has disappeared since he abandoned the web some 20 years ago — I think the only thing left is this mirror of his James Joyce page. 

But when I started making my actual home page, this is the model I had in mind: all the relevant information and necessary links on a single page, written in absolutely bare-bones HTML. And if I had the technical chops to do it, I'd ditch the blog and make my entire web presence a series of about five pages, each of which would be a kind of topical node, and each of which would continually in revision. Maybe one of them would be a Barger-style link-weblog, or I might just use micro.blog for that.

For example: like you, I am deeply attached to revising my posts — one recent case:

Thirteen revisions is on the low side for a longer post. Often I'm correcting spelling errors or tweaking the style, but sometimes I go in and use a <mark> tag to highlight; I might add an UPDATE, or, if I don't like the way an update would make the post look, I'll hop over to txt.fyi and write up an appendix and then link to it (I should probably make a page at ayjay.org, since txt.fyi could disappear at any time, but usually I'm too lazy). I also will sometimes help generate what I think of as internal dialogism — sorry for the fancy language — by using the <details> tag.

But what I really want is the ability to make several pages that use all these tricks and more: highlights, details, footnotes, appendices, digital sticky notes, and (maybe above all) versioning — the ability for readers to diff, as it were.

Four or five topical nodes, ever-expanding, linking out and back, commenting on itself, inviting commentary from others, etc. etc. THAT would be the coolest thing ever, to me. In fact, I might start experimenting with a basic page structure that would allow a first approximation of this vision....