I decided that a single-player Mastodon instance isn’t ideal. It’s overkill for one person, and it’s lonely! The #local feed is just me shouting to myself. That’s no fun. What’s the point in having a giant Rails app with all sorts of moderation tools, user management, and monthy costs if it’s just me? That’s what I thought, so I’ve moved.

First, I considered heading back to fosstodon.org. The vibe there is kind of what it’s like to be in my head, but it also ends up feeling a little narrow-scoped, if that makes sense, so I decided against it.

Another choice was to join the new Medium instance, but if I did that I’d probably end up posting nothing but listicles about productivity tools and we need zero more of those in the world. So Medium is out.

I’ve ended up at @jbaty@social.lol. I’ve had an omg.lol account for a long time, and I get a kick out of the vibe. All those hearts and happy stuff. It’s nice, ya know? Follow me there if you like.

April 14, 2023 Social Reply by email

I’m still paying for my Denote vs Org-roam waffling. Slowly, things are getting fixed, but it’s another lesson in Stop Changing Things.

There is now a “Reply By Email” link at the bottom of every post here. I’ve included it along with the other stuff like tags, date, etc. but perhaps it would be better as part of the entry itself. I’ll play with it more. I sure like getting emails, though.

Finished the season of “Beef”. I winced and laughed in equal measure. I’ve been avoiding shows where everyone is mean and/or awful (e.g. Breaking Bad, etc.) but in “Beef” it felt like at least they were trying to be decent. Recommended.

OMG it’s me:

unable to accomplish boring things until i reframe them into interesting things by doing them in idiosyncratic and suboptimal ways since the normal way of doing the thing is insufficiently interesting to motivate me to do it

@Josef, Mastodon

I’ve noticed that over-analyzing Substack is a popular new hobby.

April 14, 2023 Journal Reply by email

Alice insisted on going for her morning walk at 2:30 am. Ouch. Normally I would go back to sleep afterwards, but she kept nosing me and pacing. Turns out she had to poop again. She hasn’t eaten her breakfast yet, either, so it must be that she’s not feeling well. 😥

This seems topical:

The state eventually outsourced most of the hard analysis about the consequences of various laws to universities, then stopped funding those universities, so the universities turned to corporations to fund them and the corporations paid for the results that they wanted on a truly epic scale, which then fed directly back into government making new law based on corporate-funded research

Vinay Gupta, The Future Of Stuff

April 13, 2023 Journal Reply by email

Day two of putting daily notes here on the main blog. I’m still not convinced it’s what I want. I don’t love the idea of these rambling daily notes cluttering things up and obscuring the “real” posts. Odds are that I’m overthinking it and it’s not a problem.

I read my emails then visit Substack and I’ve already seen everything.

The blog looks good, IMO, but needs a little whimsy. Maybe a fun, changeable tagline. Maybe a header graphic. I’ll think of something.

And I’m sort of sick of technology. I feel like it gets in the way too much. It distracts from real life. It just keeps growing until we forget who we are.

John P. Weiss

I worry that although the daily posts look like regular posts, the paragraphs within them are usually unrelated. I’m hoping that an unobtrusive <hr> between entries within daily notes will help. My next feat will be to attach a class to posts tagged “Journal” and just add a small bottom border to each paragraph. I don’t yet know how to do that in Blot’s templates.

I don’t have a take on the new Notes features of Substack. It seems that everyone else does, though.

April 12, 2023 Journal Reply by email

In the heady rush of a new blogging workflow, I often contemplate including my daily notes here rather than on a separate blog. I mean, why not? It’s not that disruptive, is it? You’re soaking in it.

How does one find alignment between values, work, and interests?

There are times I would like to take this website seriously. Those times pass quickly when I (re)learn that good writing about interesting things takes time. And talent. And patience. And commitment. So I’m back to short, off-the-cuff, poorly-written blurbs.

I have no idea what’s actually happening in Succession. I just like listening to the words.

April 11, 2023 Journal Reply by email

For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

April 9, 2023 Quote Photography Reply by email

You may have noticed that once again things have changed around here. This time, it’s due to switching from WordPress to Blot. We’ve been around this block before, but lemme ’splain¹.

I’ve switched from Hugo to Eleventy to WordPress within just the past several months. This is not surprising to any of you who’ve been following along. Sometimes I switch blogging tools because I’m mad at whatever I’m using. Other times I switch because I’m bored. This time it’s a bit of both.

Mostly, I switched because I don’t enjoy using WordPress. WordPress is powerful and easy and everywhere, but the editor is unpleasant and everything just feels heavy and overwrought. I also tire of plugins nagging me to “Upgrade to Premium!” all the time. I tell myself I can live with it, but in the end I never can. On the other end of the spectrum, my usual static site generators (e.g. Hugo) feel like too much work. They require maintenance and sometimes break for no reason I can see. They also require some form of deployment mechanism as well as hosting, etc. It’s too much.

The decision between super-easy-but-icky WordPress and more-work-but-pleasant Hugo always trips me up. While debating this with myself earlier, I remembered Blot. You see, Blot is like an SSG but without all the dependencies and fuss. Put some Markdown (or HTML or Text) files in a Dropbox folder and boom, a nice blog appears. There’s a little more to it than that, but still. With Blot, I can use any of my favorite text editors to edit posts. And there’s no deployment or “Send to blog” steps. I simply save the file and the rest is taken care of.

I gravitate toward software that “thinks” like I do. Blot thinks so much like me that it’s creepy. If I were going to build my own blogging tool, it would work like Blot works.

Another great thing is that Blot’s developer, David Merfield, is preternaturally helpful. He’s gone so far above and beyond what’s expected when helping me that I almost felt guilty. He’s just nice. Reading his News page shows how he’s continually making improvements. And also how helpful he is.

So I’m back to using Blot for Baty.net Baty.blog. It’s easy, and I get to live happily in plain text files. Thanks for playing along.

April 8, 2023 Blogging Blot Reply by email

Today I learned about CotEditor (h/t Nicolas Magand). I’m writing this post using it. My first impressions (after a whole 15 minutes) are that it looks nice, it feels fast, it’s simple but not too simple. It looks like this:

CotEditor is not specifically a Markdown editor, so I’d need to add some Espanso snippets or other expansion tools in order to make editing Markdown a little easier. This feels like the opposite of editing in WordPress’ Gutenberg editor. In a good way.

April 6, 2023 Software Reply by email

I’ve seen a number of thoughts similar to this from Shane Parrish:

We unconsciously become what we’re near. If you work for a jerk, sooner or later, you’ll become one yourself. If your colleagues are selfish, sooner or later, you become selfish. If you hang around someone who’s unkind, you’ll slowly become unkind. Little by little, you adopt the thoughts and feelings, the attitudes and standards of the people around you.

Shane Parrish, Farnham Street

I wonder if anyone’s considered whether the opposite could happen. Let’s assume that I’m, say, a kind person working with someone who’s unkind. Maybe, just maybe, the person I’m near will become more kind rather than the other way around. Must things always trend toward the negative? I’d like to think not.

April 3, 2023 Reply by email

At the end of each month, I convert my Org-journal entries into a nice PDF, print it, and put it into a binder.

It occurred to me that my daily.baty.net website content is just a bunch of markdown files that could be treated the same as my org-journal files and perhaps printed as well.

I started by concatenating March’s entries into a single Markdown file, like so:

cat 2023-03*.md >> ~/Desktop/202303-MarchBlog.md

The resulting file wasn’t in great shape for printing, so I had to clean it up. At minimum, I needed to do the following:

• Convert the YAML titles into Markdown headings (e.g. “title: Saturday, March 4, 2023”)
• Remove all YAML delimiters (“—“)
• Remove all date lines (e.g. “date: 2023-03-31T05:59:55.10-4:00”)
• Convert absolute image links to relative links

My first approach was to create a Text Factory in BBEdit. Text Factories are re-usable bundles of BBEdit’s text transformation commands constructed using a handy UI. Here’s what it looks like:

This worked fine, and I assumed I was finished, but I wondered if there might be an easy way to do the same thing in Emacs. I’m terrible at writing lisp, so I cheated and asked ChatGPT to write it for me. To create the prompt, I copied the descriptions out of the screenshot shown above and pasted them into my prompt. It was just a list of things like “Search and replace “](/img/202” with “](./img/202”

ChatGPT wrote the function, added comments, and summarized what it did. The code was wrong about a couple of things, but it got me maybe 75% of what I needed in a couple of minutes. Say what you will about AI, but it’s darn helpful, even though it’s flawed. After some tweaking, I ended up with the following emacs function:

(defun jab/process-daily-blog-export ()
  "Converts Markdown file of concatenated daily.baty.net entries"
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    ;; Replace title: lines with ## heading
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (while (re-search-forward "^title: \"\\(.*\\)\"$"  nil t)
      (replace-match "## \\1"))

    ;; Remove YAML delimiters "---"
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (while (re-search-forward "---$" nil t)
      (replace-match "\n"))

    ;; Make image paths relative
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (while (re-search-forward "](\/img\/202" nil t)
      (replace-match "](./img/202"))

    ;; Remove lines matching "^date: "
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (while (re-search-forward "^date: .*" nil t)
      (delete-region (line-beginning-position) (line-end-position)))))

Like I said, I’m terrible at writing Lisp, and there may be a dozen better ways of approaching this, but this worked fine and was easy to do (with AI’s help).

All that remained was to add my usual Pandoc headers and print using the same template I use for Printing web pages and the result is a nice, printed copy of my blog for the month. At some point I may try and automate the rest of the process, but this is good enough for now.

April 1, 2023 Analog Blogging Emacs Reply by email