So, here’s what happened. The toolbar in Kirby’s editor for daily.baty.net became unreadable after a theme change. I don’t feel like figuring out how to fix it, so I restarted my micro.blog subscription instead. Now I can just post stuff and not worry about it. I’m nothing if not fickle.
I go through periods during which all I want to do is type some words, add a photo or two, and press "Publish". WordPress works well for that.
But it's still WordPress, you know? The "Site Editor" continues to improve, but to me still feels like a janky mess. Gutenberg is fancy, but it's also slow and can get in the way when trying to be "helpful".
And the plugins. So many plugins available, and all of them want me to "Upgrade to Premium" and nag me about it constantly. I hate it so much that it makes me want to stop using WordPress.
But then what? Ghost? Eleventy? Kirby? Moveable Type? I don't want to keep messing with baty.net, so I use baty.blog to test new blogging options. Maybe I'll try one of the new-ish simple tools like Pika.page or Bear.
I'll try to keep the disruption to a minimum, but don 't be surprised it things get wonky here soon.
Here are a few photos from a roll of Kentmere 400 in the Leica MP. Family snaps, mostly. For some of the indoor photos I used a little Godox flash, totally guessing at exposure.
Immature is a word the boring people use to describe fun people.
Will Ferrell
Running the Backup and Sync app on the UGREEN NAS would fail with the following:
"Failed to perform "MyMedia". Reason: "Path does not exist/No permission/Insufficient capacity/Incompatible with the external device system"
Not very helpful.
Some poking around pointed to illegal filenames for exFAT. I searched for the files using the following:
find . -name "*[\"*:<>?\\|]*"
This found more than 100 files. I asked Claude to help with a script to rename the files. I chose "-" for the replacement character. Here's what Claude came up with:
find . -name "*[\"*:<>?\\|]*" -depth | while IFS= read -r file; do
dir=$(dirname "$file")
base=$(basename "$file")
new_base=$(echo "$base" | tr '":*<>?\\|' '-')
if [ "$base" != "$new_base" ]; then
mv -n "$file" "$dir/$new_base"
echo "Renamed: $file -> $dir/$new_base"
fi
doneRenaming the files worked, and the backup ran without error.
One other note, UGREEN support was fast and friendly, which I appreciate.
I have seen the future– and it irks.
Ted Nelson, 1996
This roll of expired Tri-X was languishing in the camera, so I forced myself to finish it with the usual self-portraits and dog photos.
Now Playing: "Getting Killed" by Geese
Geese was mentioned by Nick Cave in the latest Red Hand Files, so I thought I'd give them a listen. I'm not sure it's my favorite, but it sure is interesting!
It's a little confusing, for sure. The plugin seems to be getting a lot of the developers' attention, so I'm optimistic it'll get simpler. For now I'm just happy that the bear can dance :)
So I replied to the mention at Mastodon from the WordPress notification. The reply showed up as expected in the Mastodon timeline. However, it also showed up on the blog's home page as if it was a regular post. I'll have to figure out how to stop that from happening.
An absolute classic. Makes me laugh every time. People are funny.
He keeps going and going. Fun, interesting song writing here.
I'm not an iOS guy, but sometimes it's nice using the iPad on the couch or in bed. A disadvantage of using an SSG for blogging is that posting from mobile, while possible, is a convoluted mess.
Using WordPress via the JetPack app on the iPad is not the worst experience. At least it's possible. So that's what I'm doing here. I'm relaxing on the basement couch with the dog sleeping next to me and typing this on the old iPad Pro with keyboard. It's a refreshing change of pace, even if it's not something I'll do all the time.
I have a rule book for blogging, honest, even though I seldom refer to it. I've decided to throw it away when it comes to this blog. All bets are off, people!
I just don't get why we suffer through using lesser software every day because "what if…?!".
If, for example, Day One goes away, I'll still have all my text/json/html/pdf exports, books, backups, etc. I can go all text then. I'd lose all the fancy bits, but at least I had them, until I didn't.
Meanwhile, I have this:
I'm all about plain text. Most of my notes from the past few years use Org mode. My blog is written using Markdown. I get it, but there are also 25-year-old WordPress blogs still plugging away nicely.
Speaking of WordPress, I'm writing this post using it. You know why? It's easy, requires no other infrastructure or dependencies, and doesn't break once a month due to software updates. ::knocks wood::.
I don't know how long this mood will last, but it's pretty strong today.
Suffering every day now just to avoid some theoretical and unlikely future event that's easy to recover from seems unecessary and even a little foolish to me.
I've installed the ActivityPub plugin on my baty.blog WordPress blog. Let's see how it works.
This should show my profile with a follow button:
Any reactions to my post should show up at the bottom of each post. (probably only from my other account, since I'm the "1 follower" :).
Installation and setup was very quick and easy. This seems like a fine solution.
My obsession with being "in control" of as much as possible is waning.
I don't want to manage everything. I don't feel like worrying about it. So far this is more a feeling than anything, but it's a pretty strong feeling.
A couple of examples:
So that's my mood today. Stay tuned to find out where else this feeling leads me.
Instead of deciding where to post things, I'll just wing it on a per-post basis, how 'bout.
Also, I typed that last sentence from the Linux box, then typed this one from macOS. I like things about both of them, so I guess I'll just never pick anything and stick with it.
I love my (sort of) home grown Emacs config, but maintaining it can be exhausting.
Yesterday, I complained about it a little in A blog post written with NeoVim. There's so much going on. I've spent years making tweaks both small and large. This should be a good thing, but I'm not feeling great about it. It feels fragile. It is fragile.
So, what to do about it? Anything? One option might be to switch back to something like Doom Emacs. Doom is great, but I always end up spending nearly as much time tweaking packages as I do on my own config.
Another option would be to migrate away from using Emacs for everything.
::gasp!::
I've threatened to leave Emacs before. Many times. I've even followed through once or twice. The problem is that inertia (or is it momentum?) takes over. I have a decade of notes and workflows built on and around Org mode, all via Emacs. What happens to all that? Do I really want to replace all those parts with new ones? If I'm going to commit to switching to Linux (still not a certainty), the replacements are all different.
You can tell I'm in a mood because I'm posting this with WordPress. That's never a good sign.
Anyway, I'm still noodling on all of it. Thanks for listening.