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Baty.net

A blog about everything by Jack Baty đź‘‹

Category: Misc

Who am I responsible to here?

Whenever I change blogging platforms or domain names or simply post to several places, I feel a twinge of guilt. How will my “audience” feel about the changes? Does it confuse things?

I sometimes get comments like, “I have trouble finding things you’ve written because they’re all over the place.”

I don’t get a lot of traffic, but it’s also not zero traffic, so I feel some responsibility. But why? I am not writing for money or influence or popularity. I write to better understand what I’m thinking about, and sometimes share the result. I write so that I have a record of those things. I write, almost entirely, for me.

Moving this Kirby site from Fortrabbit to my DigitalOcean VPS

⚠️ This blog is no longer running Kirby, but I left this here just in case.

I’ve recently whittled my servers at DigitalOcean down to a single 2GB instance running Caddy. When I started playing with Kirby, I tried getting it running there, but had issues with php-fpm and Caddy not playing well together, so I spun up a hosted instance at (link: https://fortrabbit.com/ text: Fortrabbit).

Running Kirby doesn’t require a database or anything fancy, just a web server and PHP, and it bugged me that I couldn’t get it working, so yesterday I tried again, and finally figured it out. I’m writing this down so that I don’t lose it.

Tinderbox for blogging?

As much as I love Tinderbox, I’m wondering if it will continue to make sense long-term as a blogging engine. I get along great with most of Tinderbox’s features, but export is one that has eluded me for going on 20 years. I can muddle my way through, but it’s always a challenge.

This blog’s export templates have become complex enough that I don’t want to touch anything, for fear of breaking something. The HTML/CSS is aging and janky, but the thought of updating it is daunting. I mean, look at this thing…

Posting from Emacs to WordPress using Org2Blog

I’ve settled on WordPress for this blog. (“settled” is a fluid word for me, but let’s assume I mean it for now). However, I prefer to do most of my writing in Emacs and Org mode. To help with this, I’ve configured org2blog and I’m writing this post with it.

I’m using org2blog pretty much right out of the box. Just a single blog configuration with the following tweaks:

<div class="org-src-container"><pre id="nil" class="src src-emacs-lisp"><span style="color: #4078f2;">(</span><span style="color: #e45649;">setq</span> <span style="color: #6a1868;">org2blog/wp-track-posts</span> <span style="color: #a626a4;">(</span><span style="color: #b751b6;">list</span> <span style="color: #50a14f;">"~/org/baty.net/.org2blog.org"</span> <span style="color: #50a14f;">"wordpress"</span><span style="color: #a626a4;">)</span><span style="color: #4078f2;">)</span>
<span style="color: #4078f2;">(</span><span style="color: #e45649;">setq</span> <span style="color: #6a1868;">org2blog/wp-default-categories</span> <span style="color: #4078f2;">'</span><span style="color: #a626a4;">(</span><span style="color: #50a14f;">"Misc"</span><span style="color: #a626a4;">)</span><span style="color: #4078f2;">)</span>
<span style="color: #4078f2;">(</span><span style="color: #e45649;">setq</span> <span style="color: #6a1868;">org2blog/wp-default-tags</span> <span style="color: #4078f2;">'</span><span style="color: #a626a4;">(</span><span style="color: #50a14f;">""</span><span style="color: #a626a4;">)</span><span style="color: #4078f2;">)</span>
<span style="color: #4078f2;">(</span><span style="color: #e45649;">setq</span> <span style="color: #6a1868;">org2blog/wp-show-post-in-browser</span> <span style="color: #4078f2;">'</span><span style="color: #986801;">ask</span><span style="color: #4078f2;">)</span></pre></div></code></pre>

I haven’t figured out how to use authinfo.gpg for logging in automatically yet, so for now I’m typing my password in each new emacs session.

Highlighting in notebooks

One valid criticism of using paper for notes is that searching through notebooks is rather difficult. With my poor handwriting, scanning for certain information in a wash of squiggly lines can be painfully slow.

For a couple of months now I’ve been going back through my notes periodically and highlighting key words and phrases. I’ve found that if I emphasize the most relevant bit of each note, I can find most things fairly quickly. It also helps when simply perusing old notes. Usually, I want to skip anything “meta” like which pen I’m using or the regular “Why am I still using paper?” fluff. Zipping over the highlighted phrases makes quick work of it.

A reason to post?

I keep this blog around so that I have somewhere to post images and maybe a little background as well as the ever-popular gearhead nonsense. So why do I so rarely post anything?

I don’t post often because a blog dedicated to photography makes me feel that each post needs gravitas. Each post needs to be worth something. Relevance.

Well that’s obviously not working, so I’d like to behave a bit more frivolous about things around here. Maybe I’ll post single images with a caption and that’s it. Maybe I’ll let you know what I’m thinking about cameras in general, or a specific camera I’ve been using or wanting to use.

Trying to live on the iPad for a while

As an antidote for my usual spiral of sitting at a giant screen full of a dozen windows, staring, clicking, staring, clicking, etc. I thought I’d try living on my iPad for a while.

I’m not an iPad person, even though I’ve used one since the day they were released. I just don’t understand how anyone thinks they can be anywhere near as productive on an iPad as on a “real” computer. Stockholm Syndrome or something, I always figured, but smarter people than I are doing it, so who’m I to judge?

Comments on the Safari 15 beta

Riccardo Mori has a few comments on the beta of Safari 15 showed up. Here’s one:

In other words, what a browser needs is horizontal breathing room, instead we have Apple doing things backwards, sacrificing horizontal space to give us what, 28 more vertical pixels?

I can’t begin to describe how deeply I dislike the new tab handling in Safari 15.