Blogging again

Nearly, anyway. For the past few years (very much literally) I’ve been trying to get back into the blogging habit but have been stymied each time by slow progress and a niggling feeling that I should be prioritising something else. I’ve managed to do some posting elsewhere, but not here, and here is home.

That all changed recently, when I managed to work out what I wanted to do and figured out how to do it.

I always thought the linklog (back in the early 2000’s!) and tumblelog (in the mid-to-late 2000’s) approaches worked best for me. I was never particularly good at writing longer posts: the permanence got to me. So I’m shooting for a fusion of classic tumblelog (sorry, not microblog) and modifiable digital garden, with a sprinkling of IndieWeb. Hopefully this approach will work and fit with the internet is about to get weird again vibe.

I have - of course - made a rod for my own back by attempting to integrate posts from all my previous efforts. Fun, but all that file-wrangling takes time.

So far new tech is definitely helping. Astro is just right as a blogging tool for me: React-ish, but without the need to go all in (as I’d have to with Next). Relatively few niggles. The only feature I’m missing is Hugo-like data templates. I would have liked something like that to store my Pinboard bookmarks. I’m also getting some genuine use out of ChatGPT, particularly for file-wrangling. Surprising, but in a good way.

This new version is still going to look like crap for a long while, though, while I get the bones sorted out. Oh well!