Websites as anthologies of self

At this month’s Homebrew Website Club Writing Edition (notes to come; will be shared likely on July 12th), the topic of audience came up. Who is the audience for our website? Do we have multiple audiences? Do we think of audience at all?In amongst this discussion, I started to define a distinction between the author themselves being an “audience” and the audiences of others (a website can have many audiences that may be discrete or overlapping). This is an alternate framing of the idea of writing for one’s self, but I think goes further in that it implies some degree of follow-through after a work.As the author of this website, I use my site in a different way, I suspect, from readers. I use my site for creative reference. I use my site to remember if I have covered a topic before. I link to posts that I want to build on as I develop an argument in future posts. And, over time, my website becomes something of an anthology of self.My website documents the seasons of my life: the fact…