No Titles
When an idea strikes and I want to write a “blog post” I don’t want to stop to think things like date formats, syntax, or even titles. Yes, titles!
I put blog post in quotes because a blog post calls to mind a very specific sort of thing. It’s usually something that resembles an article, and it’s often more than 180 characters long. A tweet isn’t a blog post, for example. Even people who actively maintain blogs opt for separate services like Micro.blog for the smaller thoughts and updates in their lives. And that’s because tweets or microblogs are ontologically different to a blog post.
Blog posts tend to be long(er) texts that are often edited or refined before hitting “Publish”. Of course not all blog posts are like this, but they evoke a level of formality that slows down the inertia with which I set out to write in the first place.
Thinking of a title for a new post seems like too much of a commitment. It’s constraining insofar as I feel forced to write only about whatever I’ve set for my title. Now, of course one can choose a title at the end of their writing, but even extensive thoughts sometimes don’t need a title. Sometimes a piece of text can stand on its own.
In effect, this post is a defense of Lettra’s decision to not require titles for new posts. This presents a set of challenges I hadn’t considered before developing the app, like how to identify posts within the UI and how to populate the Open Graph elements to make posts with titles (such as this one!) easier to parse for RSS feeds.