Last year I spent eight hours one weekend adding stacked-notes (the Andy Matuschak kind, sliding notes from the right) to my blog. Technically interesting. I enjoyed those eight hours.

In the six months that followed, I never used the feature once.

Doing the math#

A 1500-word essay takes me about 90 minutes¹. Eight hours = 5 essays I didn't write. That year I wrote 12 fewer essays than the year before. I could blame "busy" or "fewer ideas," but really — those weekends went into infrastructure.

The cost of features compounds:

$$\text{Net writing} = \text{Time spent} \times \frac{1}{1 + \alpha \cdot \text{Features added}}$$

$\alpha$ captures "ongoing maintenance per feature." I estimate my own $\alpha \approx 0.4$ — four features halve writing time.

What's actually used#

Honest audit:

Feature	Times I used it	Reader feedback
Stacked notes	0	—
Comments system	Looked at 7, replied to 0	Neutral
Related posts at end	0 (I hand-add wikilinks)	0
Reader mode	~30 (myself)	A few "nice"
RSS	unknown	Some subscribers
Search	~50 (myself)	Fewer "can't find" emails

Only the last two or three earn their maintenance. The others are debt.

Default no#

The series opener explains why Markdown lasts. This is the inverse: why "blog systems" don't. Every shiny feature is future code to maintain, future API to learn, future schema to migrate. Default-no is the only sustainable strategy.

Footnotes#

1. Around 17 Chinese characters per minute. First draft can hit 22, but rewrites bring it back down. Untrained writers manage about half. ↩

Comments

Comments are moderated. No email, no IP collection.