Blogs: antiques left by millennials!
A personal manifesto for a more expressive web: moving beyond the default “blog post” model toward content types that reflect how people actually think, work, remember, and share. It introduces ACKDz as notes and acknowledgements and TEERz as experimental “arrows in the dark.”
Blogs are antiques left by millennials. Left from the time people found a way to make emails public! It has remained the primary form of self-made textual content, compared with all the variations generated in other content media.
👹 No malice on blogs!
All this isn't a criticism of the blogs and posts themselves but of the limited formats of default content production. For example, all sites in WordPress start with posts, pages, and media. And now, in 2026, with EmDashCMS, when you start a site, guess what you get? The same. EmDash is dutifully presenting the same content as WordPress, but it’s the same because our default format of thinking about writing content is always posts and blogs.
🪜 Tiny Steps
Personally, I am at least relieved by the technical progress. Back in WordPress development, the rule of thumb for creating new entities for a website was to create new post types! 🌚
Wouldn’t that eventually leave a site with a Frankenstein-like posts-and-pages table—malformed and difficult to migrate?
Yes, my guess too! And so many other companies that have engineering teams of 3-5 maintain a content site that’s just not WordPress, but they ARE tech companies, of course. :)
So what changed? Here on this website, although it’s backed on an EmDashCMS, the content schemas are defined separately, have their own design, and hopefully will have their own inputs and presentations. Compared to a similar static website, I can change the data easily, like WordPress, and compared to a WordPress website, not everything is a post! Even if they share some characteristics like name and created_at.
⏭️ So, what next?
In engineering blogs, content types for portfolio, project, CV, etc., have been sort of standardized. BIG emphasis on the "sort of"! Yet a question remains: why do we have to write the same thing? I mean, alright, repositories have addresses, posts have titles, and everything could have a publish date (or not!), but what mandates a person to call their posts "Post"? Why not “Dost”? 😅 Or more seriously, “Notes”? “Logs”? “Gloss”? We do address the diversity of our writings by labels, tags, and other taxonomies, but is it the ultimate limit? Or should content be more adaptive than ever?
Although even the mention of such a concept could sound funny at first, at second glance, not thinking about it like this is the funnier way. Of course, everyone takes notes differently, plans their work differently, and tracks their past projects, experiences, and opinions differently. It would be strange to think otherwise; everyone is unique and writes in their own unique way! (with sparkles of GIFs and emojis all over the place, I hope)
⁉️ ACKD on life, instead of packets!
In an age of constant information exchange, it can help to think of our digital lives as networks—with a twist borrowed from network terminology.
For example, if you call me, it’s a TCP, but a telegram message is a UDP, and unfortunately, some of my friends can vouch for how much of a UDP it is! 👀
Similarly, not all writings are creations of art! Some are just acknowledgements of contents received or thought about over time. (Hence: “ACKD/ACKDz”)
🔜 An arrow in the dark!
There’s a saying in Persian about when you try something hoping for a good result, but you know there’s not much hope for it. It’s an “arrow in the dark”, and many development experiments and projects, to me, feel exactly the same, although many proved worthy of investing even more time, but most are dust on the shelf and were just arrows in the dark!
And the more the merrier; hence, the mini coding or dev experiments, "TEER/TEERz". (Teer means "arrow" in Farsi and is also the name of one of the months in the Persian calendar.)
♘ The Final Piece!
And saving the most important one for last, there’s no last; ideally, each business and individual who has a digital presence should be able to define their own way of expression that's unique to them and loyal to their audience.
Did you read so far?! Must you find a verdict here?
In the case of this website, it is and will be a unique digital reflection of me, Arash! And if it resonates with you or gets you slightly curious, subscribe to the updates, emails sent out only when there are enough projects and posts worthy of your inbox!
PS: The metric is vs. me wanting it in my own inbox! :-D