Building Our New Shrines

This is what we’ve always done: we build our shrines. We build our shrines sometimes before we even have content. We build our shrines before we know what that content will look like.

We love our shrines. We love crafting them, sanding them, staining, and lacquering them. We craft and then fill them with our precious stuff—words and images. And then we think, Ah! I need to add those pieces of lint, those little doodads in the corner: the share button and email button, the like and +1 and retweet buttons. We stick them in the corners of our shrines because we built our shrines without them, sometimes before they existed.

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What is a publisher anymore, anyway? A blog is a magazine. A magazine a blog. A newspaper a WordPress install. A Twitter account a journalist.

Another great essay by Craig Mod exploring the ways and the tools we build to create "our shrines." He has consistently and thoughtfully been looking at the evolution of creating published content. ​