Blogging

In How about some blogging stability for 2026? I wrote that I resolved to not change blogging platforms more than once a quarter. This would be an easy goal for most people. For me, though, it’s a bit of a challenge.

Over at Irreal, Blogging Platforms: For me, blogging is all about writing and sharing my discoveries. The last thing I want is to worry about is my blogging platform. I want it to be as transparent as possible so I don’t have to think about it. I just want to write my post in Org mode and push a button to publish it.

How about this for a resolution… Don’t change blogging platforms more than once a quarter.

Sooo, I thought I wanted a new theme but that didn’t work out, so I changed my mind and decided to go back to my old PaperMod theme. Trouble is, that theme was made for Hugo1, so I also had to move things back to Hugo. Had to! 😀

Tinderbox has a great feature that indicates the size of a note using a tiny icon next to each note. This makes it easy to see which notes are long or short at a glance.

I’m fishing for a new theme. I’m willing to change SSGs to get one I like.

I’m feeling like a break from all this SSG-ness. I’ll see you at my WordPress blog at baty.blog for now.

So many options. So little patience.

this is a question, not a manual

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?

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. :)

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.

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.

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.

Flickr is still the best place to host and share images, I don’t care what anyone else says.

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 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.

Today I learned about BSSG, a static site generator written using Bash.

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.

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’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).

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.

You’ll notice that baty.net is back to using Hugo1. I really like Kirby, but every time I use a platform that’s not fully static, I get twitchy, and I got twitchy. I’m using a new theme, Anubis2, which I find to be easy to read and just the right amount of boring. It doesn’t have all the features of the PaperMod theme I was using, but it’s simpler, and simpler is what I was after.

There is no built-in method in Ghost for floating an image and having text flow around it. It’s a significant omission, and one which they say is “too hard” and have no plans to change. OK fine, I’ll do it myself.

OK, it’s happening again. Hugo broke my site for the second time in two updates. I got mad (again) and decided it was time for us to break up.

We’re back on Hugo

I’m back to using Eleventy for my blog

Improving site performance by adding Expires headers in my Caddy config.

Back on Micro.blog after some time away.

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?

Tinderbox is an unusual, powerful, quirky, and amazing piece of software. I don’t understand why more people don’t use it for everything. Maybe because it costs $298 and that’s expensive by today’s app store race-to-the-bottom pricing situation. It’s worth every penny, though.

There are times I don’t feel like blogging the hard way1. When that happens, I look to simple, hosted, CMS-based blogging tools.

In the spirit of /Now and /Uses and /Hello pages, I’ve created a /Nope page.

Losing interest in everything. And some blog notes.

After yesterday’s Kirby->Hugo-Kirby debacle, I’ve been thinking about why I spend so much time farting around with and on my blog. Fair question, and one I don’t really have an answer to. I guess it’s my little place on the internet and I like to have the furniture arranged just so. But “just so” changes all the time, so I keep trying new configurations. It’s fun. Also useless, and nobody but me cares, but still.

Have you ever been so enamoured with plain-text-static-html publishing that you’re willing to burn down a month of implementing a blog using Kirby CMS in order to go back to using Emacs and Markdown and Hugo?

I don’t need a new blogging platform, but if I did, I’d certainly be looking at Prose.sh. It’s blogging via sftp and rsync, which sounds awesome.

My current thinking is that our little blogging society doesn’t need secrecy, it needs visibility.

How I reimplemented my Daily Notes feature from my Tinderbox blog to baty.net in Kirby

Let’s not overthink it, eh?

It’s possible that no one will ever see this post. I’m writing a Hugo-formatted markdown file in Emacs. This means it will be published to a defunct copy of my blog1

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

How long do we all think my Kirby experiment will last? It’s a fair question.

The Kirby experiment has been fun, but I’m not sure I’ll finish anything useful.

How to fix URLs in RSS feeds when using relative paths in page bundles in Hugo

Blogging options. Where I’ve landed.

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.

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:

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.

Daily vs separate posts?

I love Blot. It’s just right.

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.

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.

At the end of each month, I convert my Org-journal entries into a nice PDF, print it, and put it into a binder.

Somehow, for reasons unknown, I’ve rebuilt daily.baty.net using Eleventy.

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.

Am I overthinking it? Of course I’m overthinking it.

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.

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.

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.

UPDATE June 09, 2022: This post was copied and pasted from the original WordPress post. Meta! :) I’m typing this post in the WordPress editor. I don’t enjoy writing here unless I’m adding an image gallery or some other fancy embedded content. It just feels off. “So write in MarsEdit or Ulysses or something instead,” you implore.

I’ve used Zengobi’s Curio for many years when I needed a visual system for managing projects and associated files. In a recent version, Curio gained a Journal feature. It’s fairly rudimentary compared to dedicated journal apps, but I recently started testing it as a way to create a sort of scrapbook each day. It works pretty well for that. I export a PDF of the day’s entry, print it, and put it in a binder.

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.

TiddlyWiki is a single static HTML file. It does not generate an RSS feed of new entries. It doesn’t generate anything.

TL;DR: daily.baty.net. You see, I have a nice wiki, and for a couple of years, I have written a new entry in it (nearly) every day. These “daily notes” have been interspersed and interlinked with the rest of the wiki’s content. It works, but I don’t love it.

Remember when all I planned to do was to put all of my blogs under one domain and that was it? I’d still have all the same blogs, but they were going to live under a bunch of something.baty.net subdomains.

I’ve been feeling a need to simplify things and I’ve decided that one of those things is my domain names. My days of hoarding domain names, just in case, are drawing to a close. I don’t want the hassle of managing a bunch of zones and I don’t need the fees.

My dream is to maintain my writing in one place. Unfortunately, I enjoy tinkering with different publishing tools so much that I have never been able to choose a single platform and stick with it.

Cory Doctorow The availability of a deep, digital, searchable, published and public archive of my thoughts turns habits that would otherwise be time-wasters — or even harmful — into something valuable.

Things have been stagnating around here. I haven’t felt like doing any capital-B Blogging. Rather, I’ve been pouring stuff into rudimentarylathe.wiki. It’s just easier to have the daily notes tiddler open and type as I go. No need to come up with titles or worry about whether I have enough words put together to justify a new post. Writing blog posts is a Whole Thing™.

I am once again having thoughts about only maintaining One True Blog™.

Is this something I can do? Sometimes I want a better environment for writing and posting to my blog. Ghost’s post editor is fine, but not “nice”. For writing with Markdown, iA Writer‘s editor is hard to beat. I thought I’d see if there’s a way to post from iA Writer to Ghost.

Gutenberg is powerful and useful for enabling those of us who don’t feel like working too hard to create decent-looking, complex, media-rich layouts. But, most of my posts are just an image with a paragraph or three of text. I don’t need a fancy, complex, block-based editor for creating those.

Sometimes I get bored with the way I’m running things around here and look to mix things up a bit. It’s happened again. This time, it meant bringing back the Coping Mechanism blog. You’re soaking in it.