Blogging

The notebooks I’m actively using right now. Seriously. We all know that I have too many blogs. What’s less obvious is that I use too many different notebooks. Here’s what’s currently in rotation: A yellow legal pad. It’s nice to just throw stuff on the top page without thinking. Leuchtturm 1917 A5 Notebook (lined). This is my sort-of bullet journal. I keep lists and notes here, mostly. Hobonichi Techo. This is my calendar/planner. I keep appointments and important dates here. I also try to jot down a quick summary of the day or a small drawing representing something that happened. Field Notes “Dime Novel” edition. I recently found this on a shelf and thought it too pretty to ignore. This is likely to become my next journal, even though I’ve cheated and started writing in it already. Midori MD Notebook (lined). This is only for journaling. I like the paper and the 7mm lines. Index cards. I can’t decide what goes on index cards, but I keep them everywhere, just in case. Usually, I write quotes on them so I can pin them to my bulletin board. I also have maintained a half-assed Zettelkasten on the cards, but that’s mostly died on the vine. Is this too many? I don’t know. Some days it feels like a huge mess and I worry that I’m writing something in the “wrong” place. Other days, it’s perfect and I like having the options. ...

I needed a change, so I brought the Papermod theme back.

So yeah, I’ve been putting Daily Notes at that other blog.

What’s up with RudimentaryLathe?

I have been wondering if the benefits of using ox-hugo just so I can write posts using Org-mode format is worth the extra layer of abstraction. I prefer Org-mode to Markdown, but Markdown is fine. In fact, Markdown-mode makes editing Markdown in Emacs quite pleasant. Ox-hugo is a great package, but increasingly seemed like a clever but unnecessary abstraction. One of its best features is that it makes creating new posts super easy. I never liked using the Hugo CLI, so ox-hugo solved that problem. ...

Edward Snowden quote. Ox-hugo. Featured images and the Congo theme.

A new Hugo theme

For the few of you who’ve been following along, you’ll have noticed that I’ve changed blogging engines several times recently, even more frequently than my usual pace. The most recent moves happened over just a few weeks. I went from WordPress to Blot to Hugo and back to WordPress. I wrote this about moving away from WordPress only two months ago: 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. ...

Daily vs separate posts?

I love Blot. It’s just right. But you know how sometimes you just want everything on your own server where you can touch it? Where you have access to the server redirects and access logs and everything? That’s what happened to me this weekend, so I’m once again publishing using Hugo and hosting on my DigitalOcean VPS with Caddy. Another factor driving the switch was wanting to use ox-hugo for writing posts. I know I’ve said that using Org-mode to write and then convert to Markdown for Hugo can feel like too many moving parts, but I had a nice setup going before tossing it for other platforms. It’s really easy to create new posts as new headings in my blog.org file. ...

I restarted my Micro.blog this morning. I was feeling lonely all by myself here at baty.net, so I thought I’d revisit some old friends. I expect this will affect the types of things I post here in my daily notes, but I don’t know in what way, yet. Micro.blog is a great blogging service, and I’ve been using it almost continually since the original Kickstarter campaign. I sometimes put the account on pause when I’m feeling Subscription Fatigue or when I’m suddenly all into some new platform or if I just don’t feel like sharing quite so much on social networks. It’s usually some combination of those three. ...

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. ...

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: ...

Somehow, for reasons unknown, I’ve rebuilt daily.baty.net using Eleventy. It started when I struggled to make some tweaks to the site, which is (was) generated using Tinderbox. Tinderbox, being Tinderbox, is ridiculously powerful and flexible, but it wasn’t doing what I thought I was telling it to do. So I stepped away and started tinkering with its inspiration, my Drummer blog. For a hot minute, I considered going back to using Drummer, even though I worry about its longevity. Drummer is how blogging is supposed to work (at least in my head), so I started looking at it again. ...

I can never decide which blog post format I should use on my home page(s). Should I use full posts so that all of the content is available by simply scrolling? Should I shorten each post to just a title and a short summary, making it look more consistent and easier to scan? Or maybe I should only include a list of titles, and let people dig in based on that. ...

I remain incapable of consolidating my blogs, social media, etc. I’m realizing that I have three types of blog posts, “macro”, “micro”, and “nano”. Normal long-form posts are “macro” posts. Shorter posts or images with commentary are “micro” posts. Then there are the little snippets and random thoughts I can’t help blurting out for some reason. Those are “nano” posts. I could put them all at baty.net and be done with it, but I have yet to find a way to do this using WordPress (or Hugo, for that matter). I never like the way themes render all three types. ...

Am I overthinking it? Of course I’m overthinking it. Let’s face it, I enjoy trying different ways of publishing and tinkering with the tools for doing so. Once in a while, I spread myself a little too thin and consider drastic consolidation. You know, the dream of One True Blog™. In an effort to figure this out, I thought I’d write down the types of content I post most frequently, and where that content might belong. ...

If it behooves you, instead of thinking any more about Twitter—hit us with some PDFs, some incomprehensible sociology, a fact about your town, some poetry no one cares about, political theory that will never land, obscure social history, climate links, math things, some tech so obscure 20 people use it. We want your inner noise. Just push the gas on your own ephemeralism and launch us into the future. Paul Ford, Mastodon ...

In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were the original social web. We built community. We found our people. We wrote personally. We wrote frequently. We self-policed, and we linked to each other so that newbies could discover new and good blogs. I want to go back there. Monique Judge, Bring back personal blogging, The Verge Me too! I never left, really, but I would love to read more personal blogs again. Lots more. ...

As much as I, ehem, LoveIt, the theme’s very theme-specific magic felt like trouble waiting to happen. And honestly, I was bored with it, so I went looking for something new. ...