Posts tagged "blogging-and-writing":

Blogging, Tech Simplicity

Someone directed my attention to a piece on blogging by Joan Westenberg. She/they (I'm not sure aout the preferred pronoun) consistently writes such excellent articles.

I agree with her about the annoying trend (I guess it began too long ago to be called a trend) to abandon blogs and limit oneself to social media. However, I would want to include some other considerations to that article.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-case-for-blogging-in-the-ruins/

First, for those who never had blogs, never written anything for online publication, maybe never thought they could write at all, social media opened the door a crack, and then opened it really wide. It got many people writing, participating in discussions, honing their skills in compostion and other creative fields too. It's just a pity that that's where many people got stuck, and where others who were already creating joined them. So a lot of creativity and serious thinking have been sucked into a black hole.

Second, a blog does not necessarily adopt the model of an essay. Some blogs are simply web logs - they may include careful thinking on various subjects, but they may also be simply a journal, or an attempt to process the traversal through life, sometimes including comments on stories in the news, on films or TV shows seen, or be a travelogue, etc. One of the longest-running blogs is that of Steve Winer at scripting.com. He writes about matters that interest him and about his life, all in an unstructured conversational tone that is quite different from an essay.

What I aspire to do with my blog is to include some of the short posts that would otherwise appear only on social media, alongside longer form writings. Sometimes ideas for posts begin in my paper notebook, and sometimes in short posts or discussions in which I have taken part in the fediverse.

Third, as many people have pointed out, a blog, arranged in reverse chronological order as is usually the case, is not necessarily the best vehicle for catalogueing serious thoughts or subjects. This can sometimes be alleviated by devices such as tags and categories. But there are wikis and other " digital garden" formats that are better adapted to this.

However it may be organized, a personal website might ideally include short, medium and long posts that span the interests of a writer, along with discussion.

Here, in this currently org-static-blog and cherry-tree notes generated site, I don't really have a means of including discussion. I allow that to happen in the Fediverse, but hope to include in the blog interesting comments when they are made.

I've written a wiki style piece on my experience with blogging:

https://vikshepa.com/wikis/blogging-systems/

journal

Fediverse

Diary: software, blogging, estrangement

Diary

There's something about social media that it's both a time-suck and an energy-suck. I've been so busy with it lately that I have not found the time or the energy for my blog. Not that I have been active on social media: that would not be true. It's more that I have been either reading timelines, or evaluating and playing with its possibilities. Or installing, or reinstalling, and not getting very far with anything.

I've been busy both with Epicyon and with Hubzilla, and, as always my interest is more in the possibilities and capabilities of a system than actually using it. I'm simply not very good at being very social on social media, so I end up following smart people with interesting things to say; the ones who are least likely to follow me back, in other words, because they already have thousands of followers.

However interesting it is to play around with social media, blogging has greater importance. It's the place where one can record one's thoughts or place images that will have more permanence. So it's unfortunate that people who spend / waste time on social media often end up neglecting their blog. I don't want to become one of those people.

My blogging system lacks a way to keep the blog updated when I'm not at my computer. That's a bit of a problem for when I contemplate traveling just with my phone. It isn't a problem entering text on the phone. I have a nice, portable keyboard for that. Today while I was awaiting the family to emerge from a children's play, I was able to sit in a coffee shop and type away on my keyboard, using my phone as a screen. I have Orgzly in my phone and it's great for taking notes or writing longer texts. So it's possible to use it also for blogging, and then sync it later to my blog when I'm on a computer. I could also use Epicyon to write blog posts, and later move them back to my blog. I suppose these methods are the best solutions.

One day, perhaps, I'll have a linux phone where I can do exactly what I want. Perhaps computers as such will be unnecessary, and the phone will present a complete solution.

This post was written in the Emacs terminal mode. It's the first time I've done that (normally I use the GUI version). But the GUI version does not have a huge advantage over the terminal. Not that I've memorized all the emacs commands, but there's a menu system and I have my notes.

The tathatā of time-wasting

Usually when we choose the title of an article, or a network, or a domain name, we want something that will express the essence, the spirit, the suchness or tathatā of the thing we are naming. Or we are being humorous. There's a new instance on the Fediverse called the "godpod", whose owner has chosen a god-avatar for himself and makes bold declarations, such as that it was a mistake of his not to include mastodons in the ark. Well, "godpod" has a certain ring to it. Whereas Mike McGirvin - the author of several social networks and social networking protocols and of attempts to bridge between them and others, was expressing the suchness of his despair when naming his instance "unfediverse".

When I chose the name for my own domain it was also with a certain irony. Vikshepa is usually a negative trait in Brahmanism and Buddhism. It implies mental confusion and the tendency of the mind to run towards distraction. We sit down for meditation and instantly the mind rebels and runs all over the place: anywhere but where we are attempting to focus it.

It seemed to me when choosing that name that it is much the same with the internet. We sit down at our keyboard intending to write something, or read one thing, and instantly we are swept on the current of some new developing news story. It's especially true when we look at microblogs. It's like willful distraction. Or, if we personally get involved in the discussion, it can be much worse. It's not for nothing that people call Twitter the "hellsite" - though it's psychologically interesting that we keep going back to it for more.

So, when thinking for a name for a subdomain for a new personal social networking instance, I am thinking along the lines of "antisocial.vikshepa.com". I know that usually people are choosing something benign like "social.mastodon.org". But maybe another ironic name to match the vikshepa is better suited? I wouldn't be the first to use such a title. Maciej Ceglowski called his Pinboard.in site a place for "antisocial bookmarking", when his main competitors like Delicious, were calling their sites "social bookmarking sites" - with the idea that people would share their bookmarks for a certain subject.

But why a name like "antisocial" for a personal fediverse instance? Because there is something vaguely antisocial about doing one's own personal microblog server, rather than choosing a mass-user instance with a few hundred thousand soles. The instance's public timeline, for one thing would be decidedly dull.

Unless one is a celebrity or an authority with something interesting to say on a certain subject, there is also something vaguely antisocial about blogging itself, or at least thrusting one's blog before the eyeballs of others. Even bestselling authors of novels, for example, can be tedious writers of superfluous essays. I was recently listening to a podcast of an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, who spoke about this. He said that although sometimes novelists bring out an anthology of their essays, he was not planning to do so, because he didn't believe that essay writing was his forte. Indeed, I remember being disappointed by the weekly Guardian column of the Italian novelist Elena Ferente. It continued for a year or so, before she or the Guardian had had enough. It was, I think, a wise decision to stop, because however good a novelist she proved herself to be a poor columnist. At least, that was my impression.

In any case, as I was saying, there is something impertinent about offering to occupy a reader's time with matters that are often quite inconsequential - to them. To me it might be important to write, even at length. But there's no guarantee that others will find it the same. So it's at least as impertinent as trolling someone on Twitter or its alternatives, or not trolling - just being a bore, an asshole, a time waster.

For me, writing is an exercise in trying to see the world in a new way. It comes across, maybe, in some of the posts, but certainly not in all of them. And even when the exercise works for me, it may not for others.

Changes in perception occur sometimes in a split second. The best composers of tweets are occasionally able to summon up such a change deftly, in one witty line. Twitter, with its original 128 characters was really an art form, like Haiku. Not everyone could tweet well. But some were great at it. There should be a book titled "Tweets that shook the world".

Mastodon, and Twitter itself, have become such a mess due to their wider range of word limits and long and short utterances, but especially those interminable threads. How many jokes can we hear about Elon Musk, or ironic statements about his shocking behaviour, before they cease to be entertaining? We got the message long ago. It's turning a medium intended for short, pithy expressions of thought, into the opposite. Reading through the thread is as bad as reading a book of memorable quotes from cover to cover. We were hoping to remember a few of them - but eventually they merge together into a kind of wise-ass drone and we remember nothing. I used to have a book of Hallmark Haiku. It was better to read two or three poems, and then put the book down.

Books, and essays, don't always achieve their effect within a few syllables. Sometimes a novel requires its thousand pages, and sometimes an essay requires its thousand lines. A friend, on reading Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance said that it was good but that the writer could have achieved the same effect with a much shorter book. Maybe. But for me that book is ingrained in my memory due to its length, and the gradual unfolding of its events. Mistry has written shorter books, and short stories, but nothing quite compares to Balance in its effect, which is cumulative, building from chapter to chapter.

There are master-essayists like the 19th century writer Ruskin, who were wonderful thanks to the richness and colour of their prose. It isn't so much what he says, but the way that he says it, that gives value to the essay, and becomes the reason we continue to read those essays today.

Anyway, time to go back to bed. I've wasted some time. Hopefully only my own time.

Dystopia as a muse for fiction

There is one positive aspect of the increasing darkness we see all around us - the climate emergency; the victory of anti-democratic forces; the increasing number of refugees; the continuation of proxy wars; the smouldering animosity between nations; the expansion of hate-speech; the erosion of civil rights; the development of technologies for mass surveillance; the spread of motiveless crime; the destruction of the biosphere; the resurgence of religions; the growing gaps between rich and poor; the prevalence of modern slavery, the subservience of the state to corporations; the loss of culture and of cultural diversity and all the rest - it is a fertile bed for the imagination. Ugliness and nastiness are a perfect palate for great art. Good books and films are incubated in dark places. The horrors of World War II and the fascist regimes of the time continue to be a source of great movies. Post-apocalyptic dystopias are a recurring feature of science fiction. The horrors of the feudal era and of warring kingdoms inspire fantasy like that of George R R Martin. As things get worse, the literature gets better. Regardless of the consequences, whether, say, novels and films about climate change, are actually effective in spurring us to action, or whether imaginative fiction about dark regimes can urge the populace to vote for change, such art has a value in its own right. It keeps us engaged, entertained and enthralled, immerses us in realities that are even worse than the one we are presently suffering. The present is dark and the future may be blacker, but we live not only in reality but in our dreams, and usually these stories of wretched hyper-realities are populated by sympathetic figures and heroes who need to find their way in the darkness; either through ingenuity, by discovering their superpowers, through the exercise of compassion and humanity, or by cleaving to other hapless human beings in a similar plight.

When things get really bad, and worse, will this kind of fiction still be popular, or will we prefer to imagine better worlds - fantastic realities like the Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland or Mary Poppins? Will we place a positive spin on the present? The Middle Ages, a period of poverty, rapaciousness and pillage, cultivated fantasies of chivalry and romance. The only constant is the power of the imagination to overcome the constraints of a crooked and flawed existence.

Then there's another school of thought: we can simply own up to what is happening around us, and, without worming away from it by recourse to the imagination, acknowledge facts as facts, understand that they are part of a continuum in a reality that is full of different potential, and live in consciousness and awareness of the whole. Probably the only valuable kind of action is that in which consciousness is fully present, informed not by imagination but by the actual or potential consequences.

Blog and photos back where they were

I spent the last few days messing with servers on Kamatera's VPS hosting. After abandoning the attempt to set up an Epicyon fediverse instance, I tried to re-utilize the same server for the blog and photo galleries. I'd chosen a NGINX based server, and somehow I couldn't succeed with it, so eventually I gave up.

Next, I tried a Caddy server image offered by Kamatera. I didn't manage with that one either; though Caddy is supposed to be really easy, I couldn't get through the set-up. It might have been easier simply to take a plain server and to install Caddy myself.

Eventually, I chose a server image based on Ubuntu with Apache and PHP pre-installed - a configuration that I understand best. But, as I was quickly to discover, these server-related components weren't fully present on Kamatera's image. At least, they weren't working. First I found that A2ensite wasn't there, then that PHP wasn't functioning, so basically I needed to install or reinstall all of the server bits.

After a few hours, I got it all set up again, including the emacs org-mode based blog and galleries. Now, as before, publishing a blog post only requires me to compose it, press Alt-X and type "pub": that rsyncs everything including the posts and any media I've placed in the local directories to the website. That's about as easy and painless as you can get - and it automatically provides me with a full local backup. The only actual disadvantage is not being able to publish something directly from a phone. It's no doubt possible, with an ssh app and a bit of configuration, to publish photos over Android to the server, but not blog posts, due to the dependence on emacs. What I can do, is draft posts on my phone, using Orgzly, and then transfer them to my computer.

I think I'll leave it basically at that, rather than risk being over-ambitious and spoiling my configuration again. There's only so many times that one can go through the process of reinstalling a server and setting everything up without being driven to a place of "what's the point?"

For social media crossposting, I'll depend on Disroot's Pleroma server and Twitter. But for that to be significant I would have to build up a follower base again, and I lack the energy and self-confidence needed for that.

From my photo blog, the view from YS's apartment in Jerusalem.

2022-07-15-blogging

2022-07-03

Journal

I just noticed that there are many blog posts, mostly from last year, that I haven't moved over into this blog. When I find some time I will do that.

Today I decided to try KDE Plasma Desktop - which I had held off on a long while because I thought it was too "heavy". Well, I have to say that I'm loving it. Over the years since I last tried, it, it has grown into a very polished desktop environment. It has what I liked about Budgie, but so much more. If there are no problems with it, I will surely keep it.

My demands are not very high actually. I could have stayed with MX's native XFCE, but it was giving me some difficulties by not waking up after suspending the computer. In addition, I was irritated by its inability to pin applications to the panel like any modern desktop. So I drifted to Budgie, and now Plasma.

2022-06-05-Wordpress

I spent most of the day improving a WordPress website that I manage voluntarily. For that site and another, I use the flexible theme Weaver. The theme developer tries his best to keep up with WordPress's changes, but maybe it's a losing battle. It seems to me that at a certain stage Autommatic lost the plot. In the attempt to make everything simpler, they keep making it harder. I've tried a few times to adopt their block editor but each time gave up and went back to the classic editor, which itself is sufficiently cumbersome and unfriendly. I try to do some of the editing in html but Wordpress usually messes it up.

Today I tried to include a simple html accordion (the details, summary css solution), but Wordpress wouldn't let me use it properly, due also to RTL-LTR issues. I looked online for a solution, but the only one offered is with plugins - either the old or the new kind that take advantage of the block editor. The writer recommended the latter, and, in particular the Kadence block plugin. So I installed that, and re-initialized the block editor. The result was a horrible mess. Besides Wordpress's native block editor, I now had a button for Kadence blocks, in addition to another unusable button fo Extendify blocks. The latter is a form of malware. It somehow insinuated its way into the system without my asking for it, and provides options that don't work unless you purchase the plugin. In any case, I was unable to get the accordion working properly.

After more search engine research and failed attempts to get rid of Extendify and after disabling Kadence, I went back to the classic editor, where I soon discovered I already had a working system for accordions and had simply forgotten about it. That's another thing that happens with WP - it encourages you to download loads of ridulous plugins that you later forget about, so they just sit there slowing down the site. This was also my experience after initializing the block editor: Slowness happened after I'd initialized the block editor: the editing slowed to a snail's pace (in Vivaldi: it won't work at all in SeaMonkey - you just get a blank page).

But those problems were only the beginning. The majority of my time was spent in WP's customize module, where I tried, and eventually succeeded. to move and resize the site logo and adjust various spacing issues. Weaver has, besides the "customizer" module, an older classic theme editor, and I have often used these together. But this time I discovered that the classic theme editor will sometimes undermine the changes made with the customizer module, so it can no longer be trusted.

The attempt to put html editing into a GUI is understandable in modern web development because the underlying infrastructure grows ever more complex.

But for my limited needs, it is usually quicker and more satisfying to edit html and CSS directly. Moving the earlier mentioned site logo in the Customizer was a nightmare in WP's customizer, and there's a feeling of surrending control to the whims of a system that seems to "have its own mind," or at least its own quirks.

The further you get away from the code, the greater the feeling of helplessness. Coding can be exasperating too, but the frustration is more honest - I don't find myself screaming at the screen and cursing the developers - there's only myself to blame when something doesn't work out right.

2022-05-24

2022-04-22 - Hubzilla | state of the web

2022-04-13 A walk | the blog | browsers | Signal messenger | links

I have been feeling a need for a bit of seclusion lately. Maybe because in Israel-Palestine the holiday season with its seasonal tensions is on us again. I went for a walk in the woods and fields today and ran into a battalion of boy/girl scouts. One of them - maybe their security detail - was waiting for me as I approached, with questions about where I lived, whether I was Jewish, how relations are between Jews and Arabs there - he got mostly a stony silence from me as I marched through. Luckily I'm harmless.

Then I found a quiet spot to read Ibn Arabi and do a bit of writing. It's a lovely season and was a beautiful day; the wild chrysanthemums are blooming and the thistles are starting to flower too. Unfortunately I didn't have a camera or a phone. Blogging

I have accumulated several issues to handle in the blog, when I find time/feel like doing something about it. I already mentioned making the font sizes larger. Yesterday I found a couple more articles on static blogs, and one of these mentioned Google Lighthouse - a Chrome extension which is an even greater stickler than the tests that I have been using. It discovered a couple of things to improve. the SEO rating - where my blog suffers most - does not interest me, and could never be very high when I have included "No Index, No follow" meta, but there are a couple of other things to take care of. Regarding RSS, either I will learn to write my own, or I will depend on WP, which I have been using for archiving in any case. There may even be a way of using WP solely for RSS, with no front-end blog interface - I will have to check that.

I was looking again at Genesis in Lagrange. Because it is solely text-based, habitually lacklustre textual blogs seem even less inspiring to me when viewed in Genesis. One day I might decide to use it, but not now. Although I'm not a particularly graphic-oriented person, I do find that the likelihood of my reading a blog is somewhat influenced by appearances, and I have an unproven hunch that this is true of many people.

"My stack will outlive yours" https://blog.steren.fr/2020/my-stack-will-outlive-yours/

"My Static Blog Publishing Setup and an Apology to RSS Subscribers" https://tdarb.org/blog/my-static-blog-publishing-setup.html

2022-03-13 Tidying the blog

I had a problem with my server computer the last couple of days; apparently because of a failed update. In the meantime I tidied up the html on this blog - I was thinking there was something wrong with it because bluefish editor incorrectly highlights some of the syntax. SeaMonkey has a link to an html validator. It found a few errors, but these were not the reason for bluefish's wrong syntax highlighting, which continues, though all the code now validates.

Besides valid code, I have some other wishes. I want the page to be light and quick to load, so I will keep the image sizes trimmed, and maybe allow a full column width image only in the lead article. I have also split up the articles, so that older ones go to an archive page, rather than just to the WordPress archive.

Also in the name of readability, I have moved the styles into a style sheet. I have also separated the blog from the "about" pages.

Another wish is to write html that it is easy to read, since I spend so much time in the editor. Most html tags are short and non-distracting. Image tags and hyperlinks seem to be the main problem. So, in order to make the html source easier to read, I have decided to lump all the hyperlinks together at the end, in the manner of Wikipedia. In the post itself, I will simply use page anchors, which are shorter and less distracting.

I got the idea of placing hyperlinks at the end from a blog post called "The Art of Plain Text" [1] in which the writer uses an even more minimalistic blogging style than this one. In place of paragraphs, he uses the "pre" html tag*. I'm not sure that's such a good idea, because his site is hard to read on phones.

I am consciously using quotes here, rather than escape characters, because they too make the html really hard to read. Links of the day

1. Plain text

https://www.netmeister.org/blog/the-art-of-plain-text.html

DuckDuckGo Onion Search for Firefox https://www.netmeister.org/blog/ddg-tor.html

Lasers could cut lifespan of nuclear waste from "a million years to 30 minutes," says Nobel laureate - Big Think https://bigthink.com/the-present/laser-nuclear-waste/

Diary and links

2022-02-02 22:22 - Wow that's quite a time and date! Not intentional, I swear. Today was also my brother's birthday, and the day my eldest son moved to his new house. Our own house suddenly got bigger since they were moving out from the part that we divided off to rent out. I think we're done with renting, so we'll have a couple of guest rooms.

2022-01-23

As I grow older, I seem to forget projects that I had gotten into a while back. In 2020 I discovered org-static-blog and apparently forgot all about it in a few months. I remember having tried various static blogging systems, and recently read about Barry Kauler's static blogging system, and was thinking to try that, due to its simplicity. But this is even simpler, therefore better, if simplicity is what I'm looking for. I'm just afraid that one of these days I will lose even more of my marbles and be left blogless and helpless. Hubzilla is great, and Wordpress has many advantages, but both of them require a complicated setup (if they are on a home server), including php and mysql (or MariaDB). I may decide to go back to this, and, if I require something beyond a blogging system, to use ordinary html in SeaMonkey or Bluefish.

Gradually importing my Wordpress blog

I've made a bit of progress in importing my Wordpress blog, though I must admit it is quite a struggle. Although I'm using Emacs for the blog, I'm very new to Emacs. As someone has said, it isn't so much an editor as an engine for the LISP programming language, with many arcane functionalities. You basically program Emacs to work in whatever way you want and do the things that you want. But I'm not a programmer and don't know LISP, so that means trying to figure out what other people have programmed for it and incorporating the useful parts.

Someone had suggested using a piece of Pelican - another static-blog generator - as a middleman for importing the blog from Wordpress. I tried that, unsuccessfully. One problem was that in installing the necessary files I filled my Linux root partition to 100% and basically had to abandon that whole Linux installation. This meant taking some of the generous space I had assigned to a Swap partition, creating a new Linux root partition, downloading and installing a new version of my Linux distribution (MX Linux) to there and reusing the home partition. It wasn't so bad - the actual re-installation took about an hour. Having learned the hard way that 12 Gigabytes isn't enough for a modern Linux system (though it used to be), I assigned 20 Gigabytes this time.

But the Pelican importer wouldn't work for me. It depended on various elements for Python that seemed to be incompatible one with the other. I gave up with that and started looking for different options. One was to try to edit the XML download file containing all my blog posts from Wordpress. I imported it in Libreoffice as a 1,000 page file and started searching and replacing all the extraneous parts. But that was ridiculous, and eventually the program crashed. I gave up on that.

I looked into various feed readers that I might use instead. If I could download the posts as an RSS news feed, that would halfway serve my purpose. So I discovered that Emacs itself has the potentiality to work as a feedreader. It relies upon a component called Elfeed. That works very well in fact. Again, it was a bit of struggle, during which I learned various new things about Emacs. For example, I learned that the configuration for the whole Emacs system is properly donxe through going into a command known as Customize (Alt-x: “customize” and then searching for the correct component to change). I also learned how to install new functionalities to Emacs without relying only on what the Debian package manager offers.

Eventually I ended up with a nice RSS newsfeed that looked very similar to the flat plain text files that I would need to generate in the Emacs static blog program in order to produce the blog. It would be easy to transfer them over into the blog. The only problem was that the feedreader was importing only a few blog posts, rather than the approximately 700 that I desired. Was this a result of some limitation in the feedreader, or in the RSS file produced by Wordpress.com? It turned out to be the latter more than the former. By default, Wordpress adds only about 10 posts to the feed. But you can change that easily in its Settings, under Reading. It is true that the maximum is still only 150. But that's a starter. I can, I think, import 150, then turn those posts into WP Private posts or drafts, and then continue - if I ever get that far.

The latter is a real question, because the process is still rather time consuming. Smarter people than me would easily write a program to complete the whole process quickly. But I'm still somehow doubtful that it would go well. In my experience, importers are rarely perfect. The import process involves changing various things and a program wouldn't be able to do that so well. So, in my own way, I'm proceeding slowly, and, in the meantime, learning various things about Emacs and the static blog engine under Org-mode.

Writing a static blog, even with the semi-automation, is never going to be quite as comfortable as writing in a Content Management system such as Wordpress offers. You make a simple mistake in a date or in incorporating a link or an image, and something goes wrong. But I have worked with static blogs before, and this system is actually easier than the ones that I've used, It's a huge plus to end up with perfectly readable plain text files that are not held in some database. I understood a while back that plain text files that sit in folders, without any dependency on some program to make them accessible, is the best way to work. Linux has various diary systems like Redbook but I don't like these. Contradicting myself again, I'm actually writing this in Cherrytree notes. I do like Cherrytree. I mostly use it for keeping a knowledge base for all the things I need to do on the computer. There's no way I could remember them, and Cherrytree is an easy way of rediscovering something I learned 5 years ago about Libreoffice or Wordpress. I write everything down. For example, with regard to my work on Emacs. Instead of having to remember the definitions for importing an image, I can copy that line of code into Cherrytree and go back to it.

Emacs Org-mode offers the possibility to entirely replace Cherrytree - in fact notekeeping and ToDo lists are the most common use for it. But normally, in that process, one ends up with huge files. It would be possible to separate those into separate files later, but Cherrytree has much easier ways of importing and exporting to and from just about everything, in addition to rich text formatting and various other niceties. In my experience, I'm liking to go with the simplest option, rather than the smartest, as long as autonomy isn't compromised. Autonomy is crucial. Digitalization constantly offers us so many shortcuts. Using Wordpress is a such a shortcut. Using something like Facebook would be another, much much worse, option. But the shortcuts end up making you work harder to recuperate what you want, and you end up, years later, doing what you should have done from the beginning, and taking charge of your own material. And this is also a matter of proficiency. A programmer has a higher level of ability with regard to software use than a person without programming skills. As someone with only middling capabilities, I'm obviously going to seek options that I can wrap my head around. If the solution appears to be too complicated, I'm going to opt for something simpler.

Because I'm not a computer genius, and lack many skills, I look for simple ways of doing stuff. Simplicity and autonomy are always my aim, even if the ways there are often convoluted. But it's a worthwhile effort. In a century, I imagine, it will still be possible to work with plain text files that don't rely on any proprietary system or complex databases. This Emacs Org Static Blog outputs plain text files that are kept in sync with nice looking web pages. Using such a system is worth the little extra effort. There are probably various other ways to achieve something similar with less energy. There were Posterous and Scriptogram, for example, which allowed one to post from email or from Dropbox. Services like these eventually run out of money and are discontinued. The same may happen to Medium, Tumblr (currently owned by Wordpress), Facebook and all the rest. Plain text files are the way to go. Cheap and best; future-proof, as much as something can be.

Authoring

Social media and news site talkbacks have ushered in an age where everyone feels a need to comment, discuss, and venture their opinions. A few years ago, one had to be quite upset or sure of one’s authority to go to the trouble of writing “a letter to the editor”, and till today, when we read a book, it’s very unlikely that we will be able to enter into a discussion with the writer. Well-known authors often cherish anonymity, writing under pen-names. Many refuse all public appearances. In any case, the most we can expect is to learn about them through the intermediary of a journalist, who, we hope, will ask the same questions that we have.

Writing a blog, there are certain decisions to be made about how much interaction to encourage. One can permit comments, publish an email address, cross-post to social media etc. There are possible trade-offs with all of these.

In the latest incarnation of this blog, I decided to cross-post to one or more public timelines of the Fediverse. Blog posts may then be seen by those (I think few) people who bother to wade through public timelines. But I’ve stopped using social media as a platform for discussion and don’t “follow” anyone personally. I read through timelines, subscribe to feeds, and watch blogs and microblogs without personal interaction with the authors. If I find something interesting I re-share it or take it into account when composing something of my own. Meaningful exchanges do not always require direct interaction. Otherwise, there would be little to gain from reading ancient classics or the writings of any dead or inaccessible author.

Our lives are quite short – perhaps too short for superfluous discussions.

Blogging in the mainstream

I’m not sure how popular blogging is these days; I’ve read about a mass turning away from traditional blogging in favor of Facebook. My own evidence is only anecdotal. I find quite often when going through my bookmarks that blogs I had once visited now lie dormant, neglected and forgotten, or worse, show a 404 error code.

But together with this, popular news sites like the Guardian are now full of articles that read more like blog posts, and would be better suited to the blogosphere, instead of taking up space for the news I’d gone looking for.

Last week when I came to the end of a glowingly positive take on a just-terminated Netflix science fiction show – one which I had given up on after a single episode – I was just thinking well maybe I hadn’t given the show enough time, when I glanced at the talkbacks. The first commenter said that this show was truly juvenile rubbish and that if he encountered more stories like this in the Guardian he would cancel his sub. And I thought wow – I still have that gullible mentality that if something is appearing in a reputable journal like the Guardian, then it must have some sort of value. But actually, this more critical reader was dead right. The story was just a shitpost. It belonged to the democratic blogosphere, where everyone can post, and we keep our noses primed accordingly.

So that’s what I did today when reading a blog-type story about coffee – also in the Guardian, called: My neverending search for the perfect cup of coffee. Perfect blog material indeed, with lines like “The perfect cup of coffee is like the perfect lipstick: a quest that will end only with your death.” Which isn’t strictly grammatical. It’s a pleasant post, though you don’t actually learn anything (partly because she’s lazy about hyperlinks).

I love my blackened stove-top Bialetti for reasons to do with nostalgia and all-round stylishness, but it makes pretty mud-like coffee: good for days when you’re knackered, but very bad indeed when the last thing you need is to be wired like Frankenstein.

It doesn’t matter – it’s an engaging and enjoyable read – perfect blog material. Just a pity I’m reading it in the Guardian. I could be moseying around Medium or WordPress instead.

But maybe I’m being too narrow in my views. I think as I’m growing older I’m becoming dogmatically taxonomic. Hey Bob, you’ve misfiled that in the wrong folder again and assigned the wrong file name. And how can I relate to the subject of your email, if you’ve written about it in a reply to something completely different?

There’s a legitimate middle ground of excellent themed webzines that are entirely blogs. Like 972mag.com or Scroll.in. There are dozens of these. I don’t think many people go to them with the same religious regularity that they go to news sites. It’s more likely that someone recommends a story on Twitter of Facebook, and they follow a link, and then perhaps find themselves reading more stories. And one of the reasons that I’m coming across these blog type stories on the news sites, rather than in the blog venues, is that I’m not so much into social media lately, and have been neglecting my news-feed aggregators.

TLDR; – hard to say; it’s like that story about coffee. Just a few reflections.