My wandering blogging

It’s the middle of March, 2021. For reas­ons I don’t en­tirely un­der­stand, I’ve poured dozens, per­haps hun­dreds of hours in­to cre­at­ing a web plat­form for pub­lish­ing my writ­ing, old and new.

As I write this now, I have the ba­sics up and run­ning… a proof of concept. A first step. Many more to go.

Before

I’ve been post­ing pho­tos and notes on the web as long as there’s been a web. Hand-coded web sites with the kids’ baby pho­tos, for their grand­par­ents. Pub­lic notes on Usen­et and a dozen early web sites on hik­ing, LEGO, and code. Photo journ­als of back­pack­ing ad­ven­tures that I cobbled to­geth­er with perl scripts.

Over time, blog­ging took off, and the tools got bet­ter. I even­tu­ally moved my writ­ing over to Word­press, be­cause it was good enough for what I needed. I nev­er liked it, it was nev­er quite per­fect, but it worked. I shared an aw­ful lot of back­pack­ing and bike ad­ven­tures on it, along with the oc­ca­sion­al crazy story about bears.

Once I star­ted work­ing at No­vartis, most of my writ­ing en­ergy went in­to my work blog in­tern­al to the com­pany. There we used Share­Point for post­ing and shar­ing. It was truly aw­ful… fonts changed ran­domly, text van­ished, com­ments got lost. But, with­in the cor­por­ate world, there was no real­ist­ic al­tern­at­ive, so I grit­ted my teeth and kept writ­ing. The con­tent was the point.

The Pause

I left No­vartis burned out on a lot of things. One of them was writ­ing things for oth­er people to read. I just couldn’t… the will and en­ergy wasn’t there. Friends asked about my blog­ging oc­ca­sion­ally, and I just shrugged. I wasn’t ready… maybe I was done.

That said… I did keep writ­ing like crazy, but that was all in my journ­al. I’ve cre­ated hun­dreds of entries in the last few years as I try to make sense of my new work world and the state of the plan­et we share. The up­side of private writ­ing is … it’s private. You can say any­thing you damn well please, and I did. I have. I needed to just to fig­ure out things.

How­ever, without an audi­ence - even an ima­gin­ary one - I find my writ­ing is un­focused. It’s thera­peut­ic, but it’s not pro­gress.

And so, over the last few months, I’ve found my­self lean­ing to­wards writ­ing again. I keep no­ti­cing that I have things I’m shar­ing with people at work and small groups of friends that really would be more use­ful to a broad­er com­munity.

Platform Options

With a short list of things I wanted to write, I looked around for the right plat­form to use.

There’s al­ways Word­press, where I still have a blog site. But it just … tastes so bad. You have to grapple with their themes, try­ing to get them to do the right thing, and not be too bloated. For some ba­sic fea­tures, you have to pay ex­tra. Photo or­gan­iz­a­tion, which is core to a lot of my ad­ven­tures, is a pain in the ass. And .. etc. It just feels crufty. The same was true for all the ob­vi­ous com­pet­it­ors like SquareSpace.

There are oth­er plat­forms that have their own fla­vors and tastes… Me­di­um (I don’t like the eco­nom­ic mod­el), Linked­In (too cor­por­ate and every­one who posts is ar­tific­ally ex­uber­ant and false), Face­Book (too busy des­troy­ing demo­cracy), … etc. Lots of places to post, but it’s on their terms and with their con­text and their con­trol over the con­tent.

Then, while pok­ing around for op­tions, I ran across these things called ‘stat­ic web sites’. This idea has been around for a dec­ade, and has ma­tured con­sid­er­ably over time. The ba­sic concept is: build your own web site. You write your blogs us­ing your fa­vor­ite writ­ing app. You use one of dozens of tools that as­semble those blogs in­to a co­her­ent set of web files, which you then put on a web serv­er some­where.

Well, duh, of course that’s the right thing.

Es­pe­cially if you hap­pen to have been liv­ing on the net for ages, coded your own web sites, and come to love the flex­ib­lity and power of flat text files.

That said, if you’re not in all those cat­egor­ies, then self-gen­er­ated stat­ic web sites are a com­pletely in­sane idea. Get ye to SquareSpace, now.

Many Late Evenings Later

I star­ted play­ing around with a few dif­fer­ent stat­ic site gen­er­at­ors that I could run on my laptop.

Things looked good. While it would take work, I could see how I could get in­to a situ­ation where…:

  • My fo­cus could be on writ­ing, not format­ting or fight­ing the plat­form. Us­ing Mark­down or Re­Struc­tured Text, I could write any­where and in nearly any tool I needed.
  • The look and feel of my site was up to me.
  • I could prob­ably get photo gal­ler­ies to work in the way that I used to back when I wrote my own photo al­bum code, let­ting me use them as a part of the story.
  • The site wouldn’t be un­der some plat­form’s rules or nam­ing.
  • The tools could all be set up so that it was easy for me to find my writ­ing, easy to or­gan­ize my pho­tos, it was all safely backed up, and all auto­mated for site up­dat­ing.

It was clear it would take some work to get the ba­sics in place, but the tools are all out there, and get­ting there would be tech­ie-style fun.

After a few months of late even­ings, I’ve now got things up and run­ning. It’s been a blast… re­learn­ing git, dig­ging deep in­to CSS, un­rav­el­ing crazy py­thon tem­plate sys­tems, puzz­ling through leg­acy javas­cript gal­lery code, fig­ur­ing out AWS web host­ing op­tions, con­vert­ing old blogs in­to RST.

The sites are ba­sic and rudi­ment­ary right now, but the po­ten­tial is there.

It all tastes right.

In case you’re curi­ous about the ac­tu­al tools I’m us­ing for the site, see here.

Next…

And now the big ques­tion… now that I have the tools in place so that I can think and write in ways that aren’t bloated and con­strain­ing.. will I?