meta

One of the big reasons I wanted my own theme back, regardless of the blogging engine, is my ability to handle notes. With the porting exercise that I did yesterday, I am now back to writing and showing notes the way I want. The title does not come in the way. In short, I toned down the polish. I have a bookmark for a new post which takes me directly to this nice, empty page. Sometimes, the unfinished parts are what make something feel authentic and personal....

I don’t like blogging platforms that force me to write a title first — something that my current platform of choice, Ghost, does. It is funny how I still stick with this platform. The reason currently is its ability to publish and host my newsletter — the dream of one platform for everything is alluring after all. Another aspect is the sheer polish of how the site looks. But the polish is what kills my drive to write, to be frank. Every time I open the portal to publish my clumsy thoughts, I th...

TL;DR - I'm migrating my blog from Kirby CMS to Ghost. It has nothing to do with the capabilities of these individual platforms. However, I am no longer ready to put in work to maintain my writing setup. I tend to change my blogging setup almost every August. Either my boredom makes that choice for me, or my setup forces me to that decision. This has nearly become a habit of mine – here's me discussing the same four years ago. It is August. I like to think I am a writer. Somewhere deep down, I...

I’m not a fan of the tone in M.G. Siegler’s post. He frames it as though Apple has suddenly changed and is now actively silencing critics. But the only concrete example he gives is Apple declining an invitation to John Gruber’s The Talk Show. Ironically, Siegler himself admits that Apple has always behaved this way. So what’s really changed? The fact that they’re now extending this behaviour to a more "inner circle" of voices doesn’t mean they’re going downhill. Apple has always operated as a...

I haven't yet created a blogroll. They are simple, but somehow, I am caught in a conundrum: What's the purpose? Don't let the blogroll be the mechanism to exhibit that you read "intelligent" voices. That makes most blogrolls look the same. Make it a mechanism for discovering unique and diverse voices. There's no point in putting Seth Godin and Daring Fireball on the blogroll, as anyone who reads blogs would know them anyway. In my early blogging days, I included blogs from my real-life and onl...

I finished reading We Solve Murders by Richard Osman today. It's a quick read with an extremely weak plot. The story almost comes to a halt midway through, and hardly anything happens. The core plot does not progress; we only learn about some events in people's lives. It's not a good mystery for a book with "murders" in the title. After The Thursday Murder Club, this is another Osman's book I didn't enjoy. They are rated well, but aren't for me....

A while ago, I and a few others from the Micro.blog community did a weekly roundup of posts shared and discussed on the timeline. I was reminded of one such post from 6 years ago recently. What saddened me was that most links mentioned in that digest are unavailable today. The posts are either unreachable at the shared links or broken with missing content or images. The link rot is painfully prevalent on the web today, as this statistic from early 2024 highlights. Since January 2013, 66.5% of...

I had listed down my app defaults last year for the first time. I am seeing this trend of doing so again this year. I want to contribute to the list -- mainly to document ~~what has changed~~. * Automation: Shortcuts * Blogging: Kirby CMS ~~Micro.blog~~ * Bookmarks: Raindrop * Browser: Firefox ~~Arc~~ (Chrome at work) * Budgeting and Personal Finance: Don’t use one anymore * Calendar: Fastmail Calendar ~~Google Calendar~~ * Chat: WhatsApp, Google Messages * Cloud File Storage: Dropbox...

I recently moved all my reading, including my RSS subscriptions, to Readwise Reader, which I now use as a feed reader and a read-later service. Many services do these two things far better than Reader, but separately. This service tries to merge these two usages into a seamless workflow and does it well enough for me to finally adopt. I once used Feedly and Pocket but could never settle into a good workflow. My inability to form a habit of reading these two independently is as much to blame as...

Yesterday, I wrote about how this place intentionally lacks a content feed. No section has a reverse chronological list of posts, which is also due to the type of posts I write. I do not post multiple times a day, only a few times a week. I did for a period, primarily when the micro posts originated on this blog and were syndicated to other social networks. Since I stopped doing that last year, I also stopped needing to give my blog a timeline view. If the posts become regular, a view that best...

I don't have a list of posts or a content feed anywhere here. Is this, then, even a blog? Many on the internet say no, and I find this extremely odd. If general sentiment is to be believed, the structure with some form of chronological list of posts is one of the key ways that separates a blog from a website. But why does a blog need to have a content feed? I don't expect anybody to land on my homepage and read through all the posts in the order they were published. I rather steer them towards...

Make your writing workflow frictionless if you want to blog more. That means eliminating every additional step between your thoughts and the words on the editor. Intending a new post should take you directly to a blinking cursor. I lacked that with my default blog platform, which has been bothering me for quite a while now. I corrected that today. What it took to publish this post tells me I am on the right path. As much as I love the sophisticated writing interface, I am fascinated by plain, l...

I have been writing a lot less recently, predominantly because I have to make a choice about where to write. Any hindrance between a thought and the place to put it down kills the post for me. So many posts have died a violent death in this urge to choose. Kirby wants the title. I never thought it would be such a big deal, but it became a more significant issue than anticipated. I wish I could circumvent this forced restriction. I haven't explored whether I can—given all the control this platfo...

I have always loved the On This Day feature on my blog. But the fact that I had to visit it every day defeated the purpose of refreshing a page with posts from the past. It is for me to know what I was thinking back in time. I often miss out on the respective entries if I forget to visit the page on a particular day. With recent changes to my blogging setup, I wanted to get this aspect right. I did. I created a script that collates the past posts that share today's date and mails them to me. So...

I love to read about people's writing workflows and get inspired by their choice of tools to capture thoughts. At the same time, I have a very simple workflow for publishing my posts. I write the thoughts quickly and save them as a draft. I then come back to the saved draft, review it, and publish it. I generally like to do all this from a single interface but multiple machines. Hence, web-based editors are my preferred interfaces for writing my posts. This has been the case since the early day...