I’ve carried one kind of paper notebook or another on my person for years. Moleskine, Field Notes, Travelers, you name it. The idea is to “capture my ideas and thoughts” while on the go.

I’ll be honest with you, I don’t really have many thoughts or ideas, on the go or otherwise. I can’t remember the last time I was walking or at the store or whatever and thought, “Oooh! That’s a brilliant idea, Jack! Thank goodness I have this notebook with me!”

Mostly what I write in these notebooks are grocery lists or the name of a TV show someone said I should watch.

Who are these people that have all kinds of ideas while out? I want to be one of those people, so I still carry my notebook everywhere. Just in case, I guess.

tanrax/org-social:

Org Social is a decentralized social network that runs on an Org Mode file over HTTP.

You can create posts, interact with groups, make replies, mention other users, create polls, or personalize your profile. All this without registration, without databases… Just you and your Org Mode file.

It’s a ton of fun for us emacs nerds. Follow mine here:

https://jackbaty.com/social.org

I'm bored with baty.net right now. I need a break from the SSG style of blogging. I just want to type some words, drag in an image or two, and hit a Publish button. I want comments without jumping through hoops. I want free analytics built-in. I want an ecosystem. I want to be able to change themes without spending hours doing complex find-and-replace operations to get my front matter correct.

Anyway, for now: 👉 Baty.blog is the place.

I like the default WordPress theme I'm using. Gutenberg isn't my favorite thing, but it's fine for the most part. I'm also playing with Dave Winer's Wordland tool for easily posting to a WordPress blog.

You'll notice that I'm not replacing baty.net with WordPress. We all know that I'll likely be back here in a week, so I'm just saving myself some time in advance.

See you there! Oh, the RSS feed is https://baty.blog/feed/.

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. The following is a quick-and-dirty summary of how I did it.

[!NOTIFY] 👉 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.

Basically, it’s this:

1. Sync using vdirsyncer
2. Convert using khal
3. Include converted entries in my diary file

I installed vdirsyncer and khal via Pacman (Omarchy)

Here’s my ~/.config/vdirsyncer/config:

[general]
# A folder where vdirsyncer can store some metadata about each pair.
status_path = "~/.vdirsyncer/status/"

# CALDAV
[pair jack_calendar]
a = "jack_calendar_local"
b = "jack_calendar_remote"
collections = ["from a", "from b"]

# Calendars also have a color property
metadata = ["displayname", "color"]

[storage jack_calendar_local]
type = "filesystem"
path = "~/.calendars/"
fileext = ".ics"

[storage jack_calendar_remote]
type = "caldav"
url = "https://my.caldav.account"
username = "nerd@example.com"
password = "averylongpasswordreally"

I ran vdirsyncer discover once and then vdirsyncer sync and it pulled my calendars down into ~/.calendars/

vdirsyncer creates .ics calendar files, which aren’t useful for Emacs Diary. That’s where khal comes in.

My ~/.config/khal/config file:

[calendars]

[[main]]

  path = "~/.calendars/699f44f9-799a-4325-9328-aff622023096/"
  color = dark green

[[other]]
  path = "~/.calendars/2e7d0c52-d5c7-4e6a-aa2e-01f8eb84a515/"

[locale]

  dateformat = %Y-%m-%d
  timeformat = %H:%M

That tells khal where the calenders are, and sets up a usable output format for use in the Emacs Diary. The following command is where I landed.

khal list --format "{start-date} {start-time}-{end-time} {title}" \
      --day-format "" \
      today 10d >~/.config/emacs-mine/caldav-diary

It generates a list of calendar events from today until 10 days from now and puts the results into a file that I use as part of my Emacs Diary. Just make sure that includes are enabled:

(add-hook 'diary-list-entries-hook 'diary-include-other-diary-files)

Then, in my main diary files, I added the include line:

#include "/home/jbaty/.config/emacs-mine/caldav-diary"

And boom! My Fastmail calendar shows up in my Org Agenda.

I’m not worrying about syncing the other direction, yet.

You may or may not have noticed that I've been posting over at my experimental WordPress blog at baty.blog. I wish I had a good explanation for it, but I don't. It may be that my current foray into using Linux has caused a bit of keyboard-and-text-only fatigue. I mean, it's been all day in a terminal or TUI or NeoVim for everything. I have been dealing with sync and config and updates and so on. By the time I go to write something on the blog, I've lost the mood, so I've been clicking "New Post" in my browser, typing a bit, dragging and dropping an image or two, and clicking the Publish button. It's kind of a relief, honestly.

I still dream of having only one blog, but until I stop being so moody about it, that feels unlikely. I started this post just to see if I was back in the mood for Emacs/Hugo. I apologize for my continued tendencies to jump all over the place. I know it's annoying. In the meantime, I'm writing mostly here, or over at baty.blog, or on the wiki.

⚠️ Note that this doesn't work properly. There's a "nil" at the end.

Howm has a handy menu for viewing tasks and notes. One thing I wanted to add was my Emacs diary entries for the current date. This took 3 things:

First, I created a function for inserting the day's entries from Emacs diary in the current buffer.

(defun my/insert-diary-entries-for-today ()
  "Insert diary entries for today at point."
  (interactive)
  (let ((diary-list-entries-hook nil)
        (diary-display-function 'ignore))
    (let ((diary-entries (diary-list-entries (calendar-current-date) 1)))
      (if diary-entries
          (dolist (entry diary-entries)
            (insert (cadr entry) "\n"))
        (message "No diary entries for today")))))

(and by "I" I mean Claude, mostly)

Then I added the function to the allowed list

;; For including Emacs diary in Howm Menu
(setq howm-menu-allow (append '(my/insert-diary-entries-for-today) howm-menu-allow))

Finally, I added %here%(my/insert-diary-entries-for-today) to Howm's menu file. And now, Howm's menu shows the day's diary entries.

I'm writing this in Vim. Or, more specifically, NeoVim. Am I doing it because I don't like Emacs? Of course not. Sometimes it's just fun to use something else. I like to try everything.

Whenever I criticize Emacs or even simply use something else, I get comments about how I'm somehow wrong in doing so. How silly.

We'd be better off not lashing our identities to the software or hardware we use, I say.

I've dipped my toes into using Linux a few times in recent years, but it never stuck. When I saw a demo of Omarchy, it made me want to try again. Omarchy made me decide to finally learn whether I could actually use Linux in anger, on a desktop. So I bought a desktop. See It's all upside-down (computer-wise).

After a few days, the answer to "can I use Linux for real?" was "Yes!", so I started side-eyeing my M4 MacBook Air, thinking I could replace it with a Linux laptop. So I did. I ordered a new Framework 13 laptop. The Framework arrives this week, and I couldn't be more excited. In fact, this whole escapade may have been a not-so-well disguised plan to trick myself into buying one of those cool laptops.

It's possible that I've gotten ahead of myself here, but what a fun ride so far.

I really really want to reduce my blogging footprint to a single place, but I can't seem to figure out how to do it.

I mean, I know how to do it. It's just that there are several ways to do it, and I can't decide which path to take.

The best option, and the one I should choose, is to just keep posting here at baty.net using Hugo. I mean, for the most part it's "done" and it works. It's "Jack's blog" to most people. I have a posting workflow that does everything I need and makes a lot of it pretty easy. Hugo renders a simple, static website that is simple to host and deploy. It's local first, and git-able, so there's little risk of losing anything.

But Hugo can be a pain. Even after years, I find its templating system to be inscrutable. Hugo is upgraded frequently, which is good, but the upgrades often introduce breaking changes, which is bad. Hugo has themes, so I can change themes when I get bored. And I would, but switching themes is too much work, due to every theme developer using different variations of front matter. I tweaked the theme I use enough that it deserved its own fork. Now I'm maintaining a fork, which I'd rather not do.

My second option is to put everything at daily.baty.net. The daily blog is built with Kirby, which I really like. There's an actual control panel/CMS and everything. I spent a lot of time getting Kirby to render the blog the way I like blogs to work. That is, a collection of posts and notes organized by day. Add easy drag and drop of images and it's a pretty compelling package. Except I built the entire theme from scratch. That would be fine, but I pulled a lot of it from an ancient set of HTML/CSS and it's not aging well. There's no dark mode, which feels like table stakes at this point. I don't feel like figuring out how to fix and/or modernize things right now.

Plus, now I'm maintaining Kirby. It's not hard, but it's also not something I'm interested in spending time on. Kirby uses text files for post data, which is great, but it doesn't use "normal" YAML front matter. It bugs me. It might as well be in a "proprietary database" that we all turn our noses up at. Kirby should be the best of both worlds, but I worry that it will continue to be too much effort. I suppose I could just ignore all that and just use it like it is, but I can't seem to ignore all that.

The dark horse option is to give up and just use WordPress. I mean, for $5/month I can spin up a PikaPod pod and have a mostly-managed WordPress install. I have in fact done this, as a test, at baty.blog^[1]. I find the default Twenty Twenty Five theme to be kind of nice. I get a CMS, stats, any plugin one could think of, easy theme changes, and a massive ecosystem.

It's that damn Site Editor that puts me off, first thing. I could use the theme as-is, but who does that? I never do. I want to, but I can't seem to leave things alone. Changing themes is easy, but editing them is a nightmare. Also, I can't ignore all that extra markup soup that WordPress tends to spit out. It feels icky, and I can't seem to ignore it.

I'm writing all this as a way to think through my options. I still don't know which is best. I feel like I should stay here with Hugo and just stop overthinking it. Maybe I'll try that for now.