Brainstorming how to elevate older blog posts on my site

For the last few months, I have been thinking about how I can share old blog posts. There are posts I have written months ago on topics from technical writing to internet gardening to morning routines that are not necessarily easy to find unless you are looking for them. I have a list of all of my blog posts, but skimming through these is tough. I don’t want to publish something and for it to get lost when someone may find it useful. Search is helpful in this regard, but search implies you are looking for something in particular. I am more interested in the serendipitious interactions, where you are exploring without a particular aim in mind and find something new that is of interest to you.

I elevate the main categories of writing in my site navigation bar: coffee, the indie web, moments of joy, and technical writing. I also link to specific posts that I want people to find: my book announcement and my list of website ideas. This helps me ensure that readers coming to my site can experience the breadth of my writing.

One thing I have been thinking about is re-posting older pieces of my writing in my feed and on my home page. There would be a visual indicator to show that the post on my home page is a repost, with a link to guidance on what that means. The feed versions, too, would show an indicator that the post is a few months old. I would re-post things manually: if I haven’t been writing for a while, I may repost a blog post of which I am particularly proud, or that covers a topic I have not written about in a while.

As I think about this idea, I can’t help but recall the Best of Crane trope on the Frasier television show. When Frasier was away somewhere, the radio station for which he worked in the show would put on the Best of Crane, a tape of parts of his shows. I don’t necessarily want a Best of James, but I think there is something to writing a post every now and again that collates works on a variety of topics. With that said, why don’t I start now?

If you find yourself with a free hour and are looking for something to read, perhaps some of these posts will be of interest to you:

• The joy of computing, in which I share many joys of computing.
• The Lady Gaga espresso, in which I link a Lady Gaga song to my making a mess when preparing an espresso.
• Designing an interpreter for Knowledge Graph Language (KGL), in which I talk about how I designed an interpreter for a query language on which I am working.
• Photograph a bookshelf, get a list of the book titles, in which I share a tool that retrieves the titles of books in an image.
• You can make a time machine, in which I talk about how you can make your own time machine.

Is there prior art for sharing older blog posts on one’s personal website? How do you make sure some of the words you have written are easy for people to find?