Blogging

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? I sometimes get comments like, “I have trouble finding things you’ve written because they’re all over the place.” I don’t get a lot of traffic, but it’s also not zero traffic, so I feel some responsibility. But why? I am not writing for money or influence or popularity. I write to better understand what I’m thinking about, and sometimes share the result. I write so that I have a record of those things. I write, almost entirely, for me. ...

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. Before Emacs came along, I put everything into Tinderbox. These days, I use Tinderbox for specific projects that benefit from its unique features. I also maintain my blog at daily.baty.net with it. ...

There are times I don’t feel like blogging the hard way1. When that happens, I look to simple, hosted, CMS-based blogging tools. Recently, I’ve been experimenting with Pika and Scribbles. I like both of them. They are both simple, clean, easy, and inexpensive. Choosing either of them for a blog would be fine. There is one thing that concerns me a little, and that is the hobby nature of these tools. I don’t mean to be dismissive by calling them “hobbies”, but I can’t help but feel that these kinds of tools are always at risk of being abandoned when their authors’ attention shifts to something new. ...

In the spirit of /Now and /Uses and /Hello pages, I’ve created a /Nope page. It’s for keeping track of things I don’t like or want to do. It’s a work in progress, but it’ll probably see more updates than my now 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 have.

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 Unless of course I decide to bring it back as baty.net. If that happens, then 👋! ↩︎

⚠️ This blog is no longer running Kirby, but I left this here just in case. I’ve recently whittled my servers at DigitalOcean down to a single 2GB instance running Caddy. When I started playing with Kirby, I tried getting it running there, but had issues with php-fpm and Caddy not playing well together, so I spun up a hosted instance at (link: https://fortrabbit.com/ text: Fortrabbit). Running Kirby doesn’t require a database or anything fancy, just a web server and PHP, and it bugged me that I couldn’t get it working, so yesterday I tried again, and finally figured it out. I’m writing this down so that I don’t lose it. ...

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. This blog’s export templates have become complex enough that I don’t want to touch anything, for fear of breaking something. The HTML/CSS is aging and janky, but the thought of updating it is daunting. I mean, look at this thing… ...

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: A yellow legal pad. It’s nice to just throw stuff on the top page without thinking. Leuchtturm 1917 A5 Notebook (lined). This is my sort-of bullet journal. I keep lists and notes here, mostly. Hobonichi Techo. This is my calendar/planner. I keep appointments and important dates here. I also try to jot down a quick summary of the day or a small drawing representing something that happened. Field Notes “Dime Novel” edition. I recently found this on a shelf and thought it too pretty to ignore. This is likely to become my next journal, even though I’ve cheated and started writing in it already. Midori MD Notebook (lined). This is only for journaling. I like the paper and the 7mm lines. Index cards. I can’t decide what goes on index cards, but I keep them everywhere, just in case. Usually, I write quotes on them so I can pin them to my bulletin board. I also have maintained a half-assed Zettelkasten on the cards, but that’s mostly died on the vine. Is this too many? I don’t know. Some days it feels like a huge mess and I worry that I’m writing something in the “wrong” place. Other days, it’s perfect and I like having the options. ...

I needed a change, so I brought the Papermod theme back.