Introducing My Postcard Log
I started sending postcards to people again recently. A while back when I got my typewriter, I signed up for TypePals.com and started snail mailing folks. It was a lot of fun; I wrote a bit about it here.
Recently I decided to sign up for a postcrossing.com. Postcrossing is a postcard exchange site with a huge membership. I started keeping a log of all the postcards I've been sending folks since I joined!
Before I talk about the log, I'll explain how I got here. You can click here to check out the postcard log if you don't want the backstory!
Writing letters to people on TypePals was a great time, and there were a lot of really nice folks who reached out to me with letters - and even typewritten postcards. It also spurred my own interest in snail-mailing my friends. Unfortunately I ran out of steam with it. I struggled to keep up with responding to people. It started to become a lot of work to sit down and write back something substantial to someone and any reply less than substantial felt like not matching the effort the nice folks sending me things put into the exchange.
I know that I can handle postcards though. Since I signed up for TypePals in 2024 (wow), I've been sporadically sending cards to friends - both typewritten, and handwritten. I enjoy getting mail and my friends have gotten a laugh out of the cards I've sent them. Signing up for Postcrossing gave me an incentive to keep sending cards, but also gave me some consistency in getting some mail of my own!
Postcrossing is a little different than TypePals. There is a bit more bookkeeping involved. Senders are only able to have five "in-flight" cards at once. You draw a maximum of five random addresses from a queue, and can only draw more if the recpients log the cards you send them as received. Marking a card as recieved is slightly challenging. Postcrossing tracks the "exchange" by generating a unique code every time you pull an address. The senders are required to write that code onto the postcard being sent, and the receipients of the cards are required to enter that code into postcrossing once they recieve the card. It isn't perfect, but it works most of the time. It is a little bit of work for both parties, but it is manageable.
I wanted to keep my own log of cards for a few reasons:
- I wanted to have my own log of cards I've sent and the distance they've traveled. Tracking the total distance around the world my cards have traveled just seemed very compelling. I even started a spreadsheet.
- I enjoy the art on postcards.
- I like to sometimes do some silly collage on the cards I send folks and wanted to maintain some kind of record of the cards I was sending.
- I am interested in Digital Gardening.
As of today, I've sent a total of 8 cards over 30k miles. I think that is really cool.
If you want to see some of the cards I've been sending you can see the log here.
You should check them out! Some of them have some custom made stickers of my dog, others have QR codes to funny videos, some have both. I am having a lot of fun making these.
The last bullet point in my list of reasons for creating this log needs a little more explanation. When I was doing the redesign for the site, and surfing the internet for inspiration, I came across a lot of really cool digital gardens. A Digital Garden is a personal website that doesn't solely publish articles or posts in a strict chronological ordering like a blog does. A garden is a personal website that is more like an interconnected web of pages that grow with the author's interests like a personal wiki might.
Maggie Appleton has written about the concept and history of digital gardens here.
Digital gardens feel much more like websites that approximate a place that can be explored to me. I think that idea is very compelling and I want to try to explore that in my own site. I want this place to feel much more like a homepage rather than just a series of posts. I'm not sure what that will look like just yet, but the post card log is a lively little step in that direction.
In times like these I think that any creative idea you find exciting has to be grabbed onto with both hands and pursued. Even if it is something like updating your silly little website. It is worth doing!
A few gardens that I felt were pretty inspiring:
If you have a favorite digital garden, you should tell me about it.