Blogging

I wanted a more generic version of my emacs lisp function for creating new posts. Claude helped me write it.

My blog turns 25 years old today

I asked Claude to summarize my recent blog posts. Claude knows me.

I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I’m just not feelling it lately, ya know?

Creating a new blog post for Hugo couldn’t be simpler. One simply creates a new Markdown file in the correct folder, making sure it contains the proper YAML front matter, and…OK, it’s not that simple. Normally I use a small lisp function in Emacs for creating posts, but that doesn’t help me on days that I don’t feel like using Emacs1. Another option would be to use the built-in hugo commands, but for some reason I never think of that. Probably because it requires that I cd to the right place and tell it what to name the file. ...

Baty.net is going to move back to Ghost, I think. Y’all will I’m sure get a chuckle out of it and I’m happy for you. :) I’ve noticed that when running both Ghost and Hugo blogs, when I want to post something, my default is to reach for Ghost. It’s just easier overall. Plus, I can have that sweet, sweet @jack@baty.net Fediverse handle that I loved but didn’t want tied to my blogging platform. ...

The past week has been weird for me, blog-wise. Normally, I fire up a daily post every morning because I want to. I then keep my eyes peeled for interesting things to post about. I like posting stuff on the blog. Lately, though, I haven’t felt like it. Examples? After many years of wanting a Rolleiflex, I bought one a couple weeks ago. I’m excited about it and I have thoughts about it, so why haven’t I posted anything? ...

As of Sunday, June 1, 2025 at 10:00 AM, all of my sites (including this one) are being served using Caddy on a FreeBSD server from Vultr. Yesterday everything was on an Ubuntu server at Hetzner. I would have prefered to stay at Hetzner, but they don’t seem to offer FreeBSD. Why have I done this? I don’t really know. Many years ago (early 2000s), I ran FreeBSD for all our client’s servers. We only moved to Linux because “that’s where everyone was headed” at the time. I’d always liked FreeBSD, so I wanted to try it again. ...

One of the reasons for my Ghost/ActivityPub experiment was to try to better integrate both short and long posts. Since that didn’t pan out, I started thinking about how I might manage it with Hugo. It turned out to be relatively easy. I added a /content/notes folder. Then I made a tweaked Hugo list template that doesn’t render a title and instead displays the entire post content rather than just a summary. And finally, I added a custom RSS feed just for notes. ...

Flickr is still the best place to host and share images, I don’t care what anyone else says. After migrating content from Hugo to Ghost (and back again) this past week, I’m reminded of the mess I’ve made over the years. I’m leaning toward letting Flickr host my blog’s images. You might be thinking, “But Jack, that’s a third-party dependency! What if Flickr goes away?” Fair question, and one that has prevented me from going with Flickr on my blogs. For more than 20 years. And you know what? If I’d have been using Flickr all this time, I’d have 20 years of working links instead of the broken mess I’ve made by changing platforms and hosts and whatnot all the time. ...

I don't know what the over/under was on my Fedivers-via-Ghost experiment, but yeah, it’s paused.

So, how’s it going now that you’ve committed, Jack?

This week has been a whirlwind of blogging changes. Or, more accurately, a whirlwind of me thinking about blogging changes. I’m fascinated by the new ActivityPub features being built into Ghost. This would let me be part of the “Fediverse” without needing to belong to any specific instance of anything. I could blog and post to social media from the same place. People could follow me there, and I could follow them. ...

I started using Blot for my blog in 2017. Blot is a really nice way to publish a blog from a folder full of Markdown files. Blot’s author, David, is exceptionally helpful. This morning I made an offline backup of everything and deleted all the content from Blot’s folder. Then I canceled my subscription. Five minutes later, I restarted my subscription. I’m grandfathered in to the original $20/year pricing, so I decided it’s so inexpensive that it’s worth twenty bucks just to have it available. Also, it supports a great project by a nice developer. ...

Today I learned about BSSG, a static site generator written using Bash. I’ve been chugging along with Hugo for a minute, but you just know I have to try every new thing I discover, so… bssg.baty.net How fun is that!? Written by Stefano Marinelli, BSSG is so simple and easy to use that I had a blog started in, I swear, two minutes. The only thing I had to do was change MARKDOWN_PROCESSOR to use pandoc, and I was off and running. Nice. ...

I’ve migrated daily.baty.net to Kirby CMS. It has been a static site managed by Tinderbox for a long time. I love Tinderbox, but now that baty.net is back on Hugo, I wanted a playground for learning more about Kirby, without moving the main blog back and forth between Hugo and Kirby. So, here we are. Your RSS feed is probably complaining right now. Sorry about that.

Yes, I changed blog platforms again. It’s been like a week, so it seemed like we’re due for a change. :)

For a while, I tried maintaining a combined RSS feed that included posts from all my sundry blogs. I kept it at /everything.rss. It was managed as part of my WordPress blog, and since I’ve stopped using WordPress, I’ve been redirecting /everything.rss to the feed for baty.net, which is either /feed or /index.xml, depending on my blog platform of the day. I think that instead of that, I’ll piggyback off my @batybot account on Mastodon.social. I crosspost most stuff from my sites to @batybot via EchoFeed already, and Mastodon offers an rss feed for each account. Mine is https://mastodon.social/@batybot.rss. ...

I’ve decided to exclude “Journal” posts from the RSS feed. Thing is, I like how it feels to write stuff here knowing that it’s not “going anywhere”. If something shows up that is particularly brilliant, I’ll create a separate post. Since most things are decidedly not particularly brilliant, I’ll feel better keeping it to myself (and the handful of loonies people who actually come and visit the website). If there’s an outcry, I’ll put things back. Or maybe set up a separate feed just for the journal entries. I dunno. ...

Writing Desk (2025). Nikon FM2n. HP5 @800. Let’s test the idea of continuing with daily journal posts as separate “things”. I’ve subscribed to a year of Wired Magazine. For $6/year, including the print edition(!), it’s a pretty good deal. ...