Blogging

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.

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. ...