Blogging

A new version of daily.baty.net built with a brand new Tinderbox document

The guy sure works hard at blogging. Using AI to help do that seems like a fine use case. He addresses the usual anti-AI backlash with a few choice quotes. Doctorow, Six Years of Pluralistic Purity culture is such an obvious trap, an artifact of the neoliberal ideology that insists that the solution to all our problems is to shop very carefully, thus reducing all politics to personal consumption choices ...

I’ve been experimenting with Pure Blog and liked it so much that I made a new blog with it. I’ll be posting there for a spell, if you’re interested. ☛ baty.blog or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Well, I did it. After days of tinkering with Pure Blog, I’ve used it for this site at baty.blog. I didn’t have the guts to replace my main blog at baty.net yet. Too much work. Baty.blog has been powered by Blot for a while now, but I had to put this one somewhere, so Blot had to go. Most of the Blot content has been archived at blot.baty.net. It feels nice to start fresh. Now, what should I use it for?

D’ya ever grow weary of thinking about blogging and blogging software and blogging workflows and blogging culture? No? Me neither. Not normally, anyway, but it’s happening now. I’ve been having a blast testing Kev Quirk’s new blogging platform, Pure Blog. He’s done a great job of nailing the basics. It’s easy and fun to use. So fun, in fact, that I’ve been teetering on using it for this blog at baty.net. Sometimes I just want a CMS. ...

Remember when I said I wouldn’t change blogging platforms? It’s still (mostly) true. So far.

Just to be clear, I don’t have serious plans to migrate my main Baty.net (Hugo) blog to Pure Blog. That doesn’t mean I won’t explore the “But what if I converted baty.net to Pure Blog?” scenario. Things will be wonky while I tinker. Probably don’t link to anything here, since I’m almost certain the links will break. Some things I’ve noticed: Date formats in YAML are inconsistent with different SSGs. For example, Hugo wants date: 2026-02-05 05:29:52 -0500 and Pure Blog uses date: 2026-02-07 16:25 which throws an error in Hugo. Adding seconds to the date fixes it. Quoted strings in YAML front matter are optional. Many of my Hugo posts do quote the title: attribute using either single or double quotes. Would need to be removed, because in Pure Blog, those quotes are included as part of the title, etc. Same goes for tags: [“Tag1”,“Tag2”] vs [Tag1,Tag2].

Note This has been mostly superceded by the built-in upgrade mechanism introduced in version 1.5.0. ...

AI bots have made site analytics less useful

Using an SSG for building a blog isn’t complicated enough, so I added a layer of Org mode atop mine.

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. I was bored this morning, which is never a good sign. For something to do, instead of changing platforms, I decided to change Hugo themes instead. Totally within the boundaries, right? ...

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. Most days, this is what I dream of, too. Picking something and sticking with it would be good for me. So far, I’ve not been able to do that, even for a short time it seems. Maybe 2026 will be the year! :)

How about this for a resolution… Don’t change blogging platforms more than once a quarter. Ha! I sometimes wish playing with tools wasn’t so much fun. It would be better, I think, to write more, tinker less. Except that I mostly write about tinkering, so that’s sort of self-defeating, no? Let’s recap. 2025 was comprised of Kirby, Ghost, WordPress, Hugo, Zola, Eleventy, Blot, Tinderbox, Emacs, and TiddlyWiki. That seems like a lot, even for me. ...

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! 😀 I like PaperMod well enough. It’s not the full-post-on-home-page I was looking for, but its excerpt handling is good enough for who it’s for. ...

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’ve tried to recreate that here, since at first glance every post is the same. I would have gone with the built-in method by showing the word count, but that takes work to read; 250 and 550 look the same 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.