Blogging

Daily vs separate posts?

I love Blot. It’s just right. But you know how sometimes you just want everything on your own server where you can touch it? Where you have access to the server redirects and access logs and everything? That’s what happened to me this weekend, so I’m once again publishing using Hugo and hosting on my DigitalOcean VPS with Caddy. Another factor driving the switch was wanting to use ox-hugo for writing posts. I know I’ve said that using Org-mode to write and then convert to Markdown for Hugo can feel like too many moving parts, but I had a nice setup going before tossing it for other platforms. It’s really easy to create new posts as new headings in my blog.org file. ...

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. Micro.blog is a great blogging service, and I’ve been using it almost continually since the original Kickstarter campaign. I sometimes put the account on pause when I’m feeling Subscription Fatigue or when I’m suddenly all into some new platform or if I just don’t feel like sharing quite so much on social networks. It’s usually some combination of those three. ...

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. I’ve switched from Hugo to Eleventy to WordPress within just the past several months. This is not surprising to any of you who’ve been following along. Sometimes I switch blogging tools because I’m mad at whatever I’m using. Other times I switch because I’m bored. This time it’s a bit of both. ...

At the end of each month, I convert my Org-journal entries into a nice PDF, print it, and put it into a binder. It occurred to me that my daily.baty.net website content is just a bunch of markdown files that could be treated the same as my org-journal files and perhaps printed as well. I started by concatenating March’s entries into a single Markdown file, like so: cat 2023-03*.md >> ~/Desktop/202303-MarchBlog.md The resulting file wasn’t in great shape for printing, so I had to clean it up. At minimum, I needed to do the following: ...

Somehow, for reasons unknown, I’ve rebuilt daily.baty.net using Eleventy. It started when I struggled to make some tweaks to the site, which is (was) generated using Tinderbox. Tinderbox, being Tinderbox, is ridiculously powerful and flexible, but it wasn’t doing what I thought I was telling it to do. So I stepped away and started tinkering with its inspiration, my Drummer blog. For a hot minute, I considered going back to using Drummer, even though I worry about its longevity. Drummer is how blogging is supposed to work (at least in my head), so I started looking at it again. ...

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. I’m realizing that I have three types of blog posts, “macro”, “micro”, and “nano”. Normal long-form posts are “macro” posts. Shorter posts or images with commentary are “micro” posts. Then there are the little snippets and random thoughts I can’t help blurting out for some reason. Those are “nano” posts. I could put them all at baty.net and be done with it, but I have yet to find a way to do this using WordPress (or Hugo, for that matter). I never like the way themes render all three types. ...

Am I overthinking it? Of course I’m overthinking it. Let’s face it, I enjoy trying different ways of publishing and tinkering with the tools for doing so. Once in a while, I spread myself a little too thin and consider drastic consolidation. You know, the dream of One True Blog™. In an effort to figure this out, I thought I’d write down the types of content I post most frequently, and where that content might belong. ...

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. Paul Ford, Mastodon ...

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. I want to go back there. Monique Judge, Bring back personal blogging, The Verge Me too! I never left, really, but I would love to read more personal blogs again. Lots more. ...

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. I’m using org2blog pretty much right out of the box. Just a single blog configuration with the following tweaks: <div class="org-src-container"><pre id="nil" class="src src-emacs-lisp"><span style="color: #4078f2;">(</span><span style="color: #e45649;">setq</span> <span style="color: #6a1868;">org2blog/wp-track-posts</span> <span style="color: #a626a4;">(</span><span style="color: #b751b6;">list</span> <span style="color: #50a14f;">"~/org/baty.net/.org2blog.org"</span> <span style="color: #50a14f;">"wordpress"</span><span style="color: #a626a4;">)</span><span style="color: #4078f2;">)</span> <span style="color: #4078f2;">(</span><span style="color: #e45649;">setq</span> <span style="color: #6a1868;">org2blog/wp-default-categories</span> <span style="color: #4078f2;">'</span><span style="color: #a626a4;">(</span><span style="color: #50a14f;">"Misc"</span><span style="color: #a626a4;">)</span><span style="color: #4078f2;">)</span> <span style="color: #4078f2;">(</span><span style="color: #e45649;">setq</span> <span style="color: #6a1868;">org2blog/wp-default-tags</span> <span style="color: #4078f2;">'</span><span style="color: #a626a4;">(</span><span style="color: #50a14f;">""</span><span style="color: #a626a4;">)</span><span style="color: #4078f2;">)</span> <span style="color: #4078f2;">(</span><span style="color: #e45649;">setq</span> <span style="color: #6a1868;">org2blog/wp-show-post-in-browser</span> <span style="color: #4078f2;">'</span><span style="color: #986801;">ask</span><span style="color: #4078f2;">)</span></pre></div></code></pre> I haven’t figured out how to use authinfo.gpg for logging in automatically yet, so for now I’m typing my password in each new emacs session. ...

TiddlyWiki is a single static HTML file. It does not generate an RSS feed of new entries. It doesn’t generate anything. I treat my wiki at wiki.baty.net more like a blog than a wiki, so not having an RSS feed feels like an omission. Most of the time I consider this to be a feature. I like that I can write any old nonsense and it doesn’t actively go out and bother anyone. It’s my little secret, that you can read if you want. ...

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. Writing in TiddlyWiki is fine. It’s super easy, but it’s also a little clunky, which quickly becomes friction. And the experience for visitors is weird if you’re not familiar with TiddlyWiki. Also, there’s no RSS feed. I sometimes consider this a feature, because it’s nice writing freely and knowing it’s not “going anywhere”. On the other hand, if I were someone wanting to follow along with me, I’d want a damn RSS feed. ...

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. Well, I got carried away. I brought back baty.net as a blog (WordPress) and migrated all of my recent Write.as posts and imported everything from Copingmechanism.com. I am once again living at baty.net. ...

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. To that end, I’m working toward moving everything to subdomains of baty.net. I’ve already moved my wiki from rudimentarylathe.wiki to rl.baty.net. I considered wiki.baty.net and may still use that instead. ...

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. I’m going to try focusing my writing here at copingmechanism.com for a while and see if I can live here. This means baty.blog is on hold for the time being. One thing I wanted here was a theme that wasn’t quite so overwrought as “Hive”. I wanted something a little more old-school. I was poking around and found that James Vornov’s great blog, On Deciding…Better, uses the Graphy WordPress theme, which I really like. I knew it seemed familiar because I had actually purchased the pro version of the theme back in April. And around we go! ...