This site – okjuan.me/vbook – contains all my public writing. My

for it was to gather all my essays to create a wikipedia-like experience. Then I realized I should loosen the restriction on form and build a vaster network of ideas, one that may include notes, reviews, journal entries, poems, stories, pictures, videos, audio, or any form that is yet to occur to me or anyone else.

You can think of this site as a digital garden, but I hope it becomes a good example of what I call a

.

I’ve been traveling, furnishing, reading, writing, and more.

An odd perk of splitting my time between Seattle and Vancouver has been furnishing and decorating a second apartment, a task for which I have enough gusto to do twice over. More than twice, actually. I’ve starting telling friends that I would gladly help them lay out their spaces. I told one friend in particular, who finds furnishing and decorating stultifying, that when he buys his house, I will invite myself over and personally hang the artwork and mirror that have been leaning against his apartment walls for years. I routinely watch Never Too Small and Noah Daniel and have been toying with the idea of making TikToks or Instagram reels about my amateur interest in interior design. I already have the topic for the initial video: how to get cheap artwork that you love.

Among the finest decisions I’ve made recently is buying patio furniture for our balcony. I bought it secondhand for $420 USD ($575 CAD), delivery included, and within a week have spent many more minutes (in either currency) lounging, reading, writing, and working on it. I expect to recoup a good deal of the principal when we resell in a year or two.

By furnishing the balcony we’ve added to our apartment a whole new space to be in. It’s like a tree house, perched up among a variety of leafy growth. Beyond the branches, in the evenings, lays the orange pink sunset silhouetting cranes on the port and past them the city skyline. It reminds me of this bit from Gail Sheehy’s memoir:

My alcove is more modest, but magical still. A private little post embedded in the city. A perfect place to read and write.

I’ve been sitting out on the balcony with a little stack of books and

.

I think the ongoing masculinity crisis can be understood as a

.

Most of what I’ve

has to do with New York, but I also finally wrote a review of

, the first of Cormac McCarthy’s last

novels. I also wrote a

in my series of how to coordinate metaphors.

Z and I went to Tofino with my family for a week to celebrate my mom’s birthday. We spent time together, ate great meals, surfed on beautiful beaches, hung out at a wonderful airbnb near the heart of town, spent a day in an outdoor spa in a private cove lounging in hot tubs filled with seaweed, and even saw the Northern Lights. Z and I want to go back.

A week later, Z and I went to

to affirm our suspicion that we would like to live there before we have kids. I have a bad habit of winging trips, but in the month leading up to this one I dedicated good hours to research and planning. The time spent was well worth it, rendering some of the most memorable experiences of the trip: Comedy Cellar, Village Vanguard,

, Whitney Museum (for free), Tiny Cupboard Comedy Club, Roberta’s, and SEY coffee. Some of these I booked in advance, and the others I was aware of and pounced on when the opportunity arose.

We recently also spent a weekend with friends at an airbnb in Lake Cowichan. The weather was a bit disappointing, but we had a great time hanging out in and around the hot tub.

I’ve delivered some good results at work recently. My tasks continue to be interesting and plenty. However, it looks like my next promotion, which I was expecting in September, won’t happen until December. I’m disappointed, but when I reflect on it carefully, I notice it’s not that important. By no means do I need to be promoted. It’s alluring because it’s a quantifiable and salient achievement. But it’s not important one.

Spotify again rejected my request for an extended quota. I emailed them back asking to speak to a real person. No response. It looks like it’s going to be difficult to make my app available to all Spotify premium users, unfortunately. That project will sit on the backburner for a while.

As for my other recent programming project – this site – I have some interesting new ideas. To encourage myself to

, I want to re-order posts by their most recently edited date rather than their original publish date. That way, I could breathe new life into old ideas that I failed to do justice on initial attempt and baptize them again as new pieces. This aligns with the dynamic aspect of my

idea. A related idea I have for this site is to let (hypothetical) readers see past versions of each post, in the spirit of what I wrote in my essay

last year:

One of my core interests, and one of the core passions behind this site, is the process of writing. Interfaces that illuminate and accentuate that process intrigue me.

Peep Show. Second watch. So funny.

Curb Your Enthusiasm. Hilarious. Like Peep Show, soothing with its insanity.

Baby Reindeer, which was haunting, disturbing, and fantastic.

Welcome to Wrexham. S3 is less ambitious, but still good.

House of the Dragon. Good

. Rewatched S1 in preparation for S2, which is currently airing.

Fantasmas. Unsettling in a very effective way, like a hyper-pop Black Mirror. Wonderfully weird and delightfully non-linear. By now I know I am a sucker for tangential and episodic storytelling.

Dream Scenario. Unsettling. I kept oscillating between sympathy and disgust for the main character, an intended effect, I think. However, ultimately, it didn’t seem to have a cogent point to make. Or maybe I missed it.

Challengers. Very entertaining. I loved the toxic triangle between the three main characters: one chooses to be dominated, one needs to dominate, and one dominates himself to preclude others doing it. The codependence and power dynamics rang true until they fell a bit flat towards the end.

Radical Wolfe, documentary about writer Tom Wolfe (and former colleague of Gloria Steinem at New York magazine). Somewhat entertaining but suspiciously uncritical, as biopics and posthumous documentary tributes tend to be.

Enjoying the rare and splendid sunny days of PNW summer. Biking, paddleboarding, playing soccer, volleyball with friends.

I’m curious about playing goalkeeper for a new team. I’ve been an outfield player exclusively for years, but I used to play goalie part-time and fill in when needed. I miss it a bit. And goalies are always in demand, so it should be an easy way to get more playing time. Hopefully I’m not overestimating my skills in net. I think I’ll find out soon.

Cap Hill Block Party. Excited about seeing Chappell Roan, who is apparently great to see live.

Visit PEI, before Z’s mom and stepdad sell the house they have on the beach there.

In the spirit of making this site dynamic

, I added modified dates and revisions.

Firstly, I added modified dates to all posts and a way to sort them by post date or modified date. This discourages me from treating posts like static pieces and instead encourages me to edit, rework, and reimagine them. I didn’t want to be responsible for manually updating the modified date of a post, so I automated it.

For my first attempt at implementing it, I put together a plugin written in Ruby (mostly written by GitHub Copilot) that found the most recent commit’s date for each post by looking through the Git history. It worked, but it also slowed down my local build a lot. I found a much better solution: set up a git pre-commit hook that updates the modified_date in a post’s frontmatter when a change is committed to it. To implement sorting, I had to use JavaScript. Working on a static website has made me appreciate how much is possible without JavaScript and what isn’t.

More challenging to implement and more exciting to complete was a feature I’m calling Revisions, which shows past edits of select posts. This one was even more important to automate. Manually creating a revision for every new post would be a ponderous task that would deincentivize me from making changes. Automatically generated revisions, on the other hand, excite me to make changes. I want to see how posts change over time and how the converge to “final” form.

So, the main task was to plug into the Jekyll build to generate new pages that represent the difference between every pair of sequential commits in a post’s Git history. Once I had that, I just had to do some minor coding in HTML and Liquid to add links in a post’s metadata to link to its revisions.

After I figured out how to get the full Git word diff between two commits (the git gem’s API apparently doesn’t expose this part of Git’s functionality), most of the trouble had to do with formatting: stripping Git diff metadata, replacing diff markers with markdown formatting, transforming Markdown to HTML, and styling the HTML. After I finally got it working locally, I pushed it up to GitHub to kick off the build and publish job. But after the GitHub Actions finished, the site didn’t look any different!

It took me a while to figure out why the GitHub Pages build was passing but not generating any revisions. I figured the git gem wasn’t being installed since it isn’t in the list of packages supported by GitHub Pages. It seemed like the plugin wasn’t running at all. Only after I added print statements to it did I realize that it was running, but only finding a single commit. Finally, I fixed it by setting the fetch-depth of the checkout action to a pseudoinfinite number so that the full Git history would get processed.

I set it up so I can easily enable or disable revisions for a post by setting show_revisions in its frontmatter. So far, I’ve enabled revisions for

,

, and

.

In the spirit of making this site dynamic

, I added modified dates and revisions.

Firstly, I added modified dates to all posts and a way to sort them by post date or modified date. This discourages me from treating posts like static pieces and instead encourages me to edit, rework, and reimagine them. I didn’t want to be responsible for manually updating the modified date of a post, so I automated it.

For my first attempt at implementing it, I put together a plugin written in Ruby (mostly written by GitHub Copilot) that found the most recent commit’s date for each post by looking through the Git history. It worked, but it also slowed down my local build a lot. I found a much better solution: set up a git pre-commit hook that updates the modified_date in a post’s frontmatter when a change is committed to it. To implement sorting, I had to use JavaScript. Working on a static website has made me appreciate how much is possible without JavaScript and what isn’t.

More challenging to implement and more exciting to complete was a feature I’m calling Revisions, which shows past edits of select posts. This one was even more important to automate. Manually creating a revision for every new post would be a ponderous task that would deincentivize me from making changes. Automatically generated revisions, on the other hand, excite me to make changes. I want to see how posts change over time and how the converge to “final” form.

So, the main task was to plug into the Jekyll build to generate new pages that represent the difference between every pair of sequential commits in a post’s Git history. Once I had that, I just had to do some minor coding in HTML and Liquid to add links in a post’s metadata to link to its revisions.

After I figured out how to get the full Git word diff between two commits (the git gem’s API apparently doesn’t expose this part of Git’s functionality), most of the trouble had to do with formatting: stripping Git diff metadata, replacing diff markers with markdown formatting, transforming Markdown to HTML, and styling the HTML. After I finally got it working locally, I pushed it up to GitHub to kick off the build and publish job. But after the GitHub Actions finished, the site didn’t look any different!

It took me a while to figure out why the GitHub Pages build was passing but not generating any revisions. I figured the git gem wasn’t being installed since it isn’t in the list of packages supported by GitHub Pages. It seemed like the plugin wasn’t running at all. Only after I added print statements to it did I realize that it was running, but only finding a single commit. Finally, I fixed it by setting the fetch-depth of the checkout action to a pseudoinfinite number so that the full Git history would get processed.

I set it up so I can easily enable or disable revisions for a post by setting show_revisions in its frontmatter. So far, I’ve enabled revisions for

,

, and

.

Many features I’ve implemented on this site – e.g.

– encourage retroactive editing of posts. Today, I implemented a minor feature in the same spirit: configurable redirects. This allows me to easily give a post a new URL without making its previous one(s) obsolete. All I have to do is make two configuration changes in the frontmatter of the relevant post:

For example, I changed

to

. If I later decide to change the URL again e.g. to okjuan.me/vbook/why-i-write, I just have to set permalink: /why-i-write and redirect_from: ['why-write', '/justify-writing'] in the post’s frontmatter.

A nice side-effect of this change is that I can make a post’s URL match its title even if I change it. Another perk is that I can easily update okjuan.me/vbook/now to point to my latest what I’m doing now post. But probably this feature’s most useful effect, and the reason I thought to implement it in the first place, is that it lets me realign a post into a series. For example, by changing the title of how to justify writing to why write?, I can make it the first entry in a series that I can create by writing posts why write? #2, why write? #3, and so on.

I anticipate confusion regarding the name of this site. How is it a book? Sure, it abides by the criteria of a socalled

– multimedia, readerdriven, nonlinear, etc – but it’s still basically just a blog, isn’t it?

Granted, this is not a book. Not yet. But over time, it may become one. In fact I hope it will become multiple, overlapping books. I intend to accumulate relevant and complementary content without prescribing a single vision or intention for it so that it can take a shape of its own. Shapes of its own. At points in the future I may be able to collect multiple pieces into discrete, booklike forms.

It’s been two years since I began this project and already emerging are various potential booklike projects. An obvious one is compiling posts from a title series like

,

,

,

, and so on, into a single work. Naturally, other pieces tagged as #writing would make good candidates for inclusion in that work. The same for

,

,

, and future entries. These titles are intentionally broad so they can hold a variety of perspectives on the topic that may later be combined to serve unforeseen ends. I expect that any such attempts will prompt me to write new material that fuses all the pieces together, thereby creating a seamless new whole.

But that’s only one way in which I want “books” to develop from this site. I also want them to sprout organically from the haphazard crosspollination of ideas that features like tagging and backlinking enable. I recently implemented another feature called revisions – which I talked about in my Sept 30th 2024

update – that adds yet another dimension through which a reader (including myself) can traverse the content on this site. Automation is a powerful way to highlight implicit relationships that already exist between pieces. They enable unplanned connections to grow across topics and time. The next feature I intend to automate is a simple and intuitive one: links between posts in a title series.

It’s fitting that this site itself is the fusion product of

. As I’ve said before, the Zettelkasten method of knowledge management is one of them. The method, as noted by researcher Andy Matuschak on his own Zettelkasten-inspired website, enabled Germany sociologist Niklas Luhmann to publish more than 70 books. My writing ambitions are far more modest, but I am interested in adapting the method into a way of writing “books” directly, as opposed to its original purpose of amassing research into a network of information that may then be synthesized and captured in newly written prose. I want to start by writing prose in small chunks and see if the resulting pieces can themselves comprise a booklike thing.

And yet the point of this site is not to become a book, but to provide booklike experiences

of a book. The point is not merely to create books through piecemeal writing, but also to offer pieces by themselves and as an assortment of nonlinear orderings, unlike the offering of the traditional book: single, linear, and monolithic. This site is not just a means but an end itself.

Finally, I want to say that, despite all this, I don’t look at books with contempt or ungratefulness. I love books. They have changed my life for the better and I’d like to return the favor.