# 🔗 Understanding blogs – Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden

- Author: @gurupanguji
- Date: 2026-06-05
- URL: https://gurupanguji.com/blog/2026/06/05/understanding-blogs-tracy-durnells-mind-garden/
- Categories: link

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> A characteristic I’ve noticed of many blog articles is that they are not structured in the traditional Western essay format: they don’t state a thesis at the beginning.\* Often, they are **explorations on a theme**, or **build an argument as they go**, only reaching a conclusion at the end.\*\*

*Source:* [Understanding blogs – Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden](https://tracydurnell.com/2023/01/15/understanding-blogs/)

> **And if you zoom out from the individual blog post level, in a sense this also describes what blogs are: a contemplation on a particular theme in depth** (even if that theme is “the author’s life” or “stuff I like”). A blog is a *body of work*. Blogs are composed of many posts, which stand individually and can be read in any order, and which collectively form *a blog* that tells a story from all of its individual posts. Unlike a book, blogs grow and shift for as long as they are online, each added post changing *the blog* incrementally.

*Source:* [Understanding blogs – Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden](https://tracydurnell.com/2023/01/15/understanding-blogs/)

fLamed fury's latest list of posts linked me to this excellent post exploring blogging. Now, clearly the author and I started blogging around the same time - early aughts. The whole post is worth a read. 

Yet, these two paragraphs capture the essence of a blog. They are an exploration of a theme. As a result, very few blogs that I consider worth reading push a thesis from the beginning. They _arrive_ at one. Sometimes in an entirely different post. Sometimes, the author changes their mind and links back. Or flip flops across time spans. 

Blogs help me _get to know_ the person and their thinking, often more than the thesis. I guess it's reality TV for the people that like to read.