Helping other people use technology requires humility: you have to want to help them realize their goals, which may be totally unlike your own. You have to listen carefully and take care not to make assumptions about how they “should” use tech. You may be a tech expert, but they are experts on themselves.
The sheer volume of tooling and resources around WordPress is a compelling argument in its favor. As long as I don’t have to use the Site Editor, I think I could live here.
I like having anonymous comments (for now). I like detailed analytics built in. I like having an enormous amount of plugins available (even though I hope I don’t need any of them). I like having a bunch of utilities for managing posts and categories and tags. I like the “Press This” bookmarklet for quickly quoting stuff.
I dislike Gutenberg, but if I’m honest, I dislike anything that’s not Emacs, so what’re ya gonna do? ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
Please, there must be a thousand ways to do this that I haven’t discovered. If you know of anything simpler, I’m all ears.
Update: Sebastián to the rescue with his cdsync package
Seb let me know about his package that does all this and more: cdsync
I use the Emacs Diary all the time. I prefer it to using only Org-mode dates in my agenda. The tricky piece is getting the stuff from my CalDAV (Fastmail) calendar into the diary.
Hanno’s post, Managing calendar events in Emacs got me started. Their post is more geared toward Org dates, but it gave me a good leg up.
The side of my neighbor’s house (2025). Nikon F100. Kodak ColorPlus.
I was testing my first roll of Kodak ColorPlus film, so while walking the dog I took this snap of the side of my neighbor’s house. It’s supposed to be a throwaway, but I dig it for some reason. The more I look at it, the more I like it.
I was using the Nikon F100, so I didn’t bother to think I might have set the ISO manually on an earlier roll. Sure enough, it was set at ISO 400. ColorPlus is a 200 speed film. Whoops. I noticed my mistake halfway through the roll, but figured I’d take the opportunity to push color film for my first time. It kind if ruined the “How good is ColorPlus?” experiment, but oh well.
I scanned it using the Leica SL2 mounted on a Negative Supply rig, then inverted the scans using Negative Lab Pro in Lightroom (Classic).
As usual, the colors look weird to me. The shadows have a splash of magenta and everything looks just a little off.
And yet, I love the photo. I love the diagonal monochrome/color separation. I like the placement of the rocks and the tree. I like the air conditioner unit in the center. The single sunlit yellow flower against deep shadow. And I really love the satellite dish.
SilverBullet is another tool for notes. I toyed with it last year for a bit and it was great fun. It’s definitely geared toward the nerdier crowd, but for someone who wants to build a system of notes around a bunch of Markdown files, SilverBullet is a good option. I like it much more than Obsidian, fwiw.
While testing LazyDocker on Omarchy, I figured I’d use SilverBullet as a test bed. That was easy.
LazyDocker running SilverBullet
I doubt I’ll actually use SilverBullet for my notes, but it’s tempting.
Is it OK that I like posting in a bunch of different places using a bunch of different tools and methods? I think it’s OK. Today, I don’t feel like typing this in Emacs and then deploying the Hugo blog, even though it’s easy and I love Emacs and static websites. Today, I feel like clicking a button, typing some words, and clicking another button, using nothing but a WordPress installation somewhere out there.
