I haven't blogged in years. A big part is laziness and/or life getting in the way. Blogging has also (don't know if you've heard) fallen out of favor compared to the 2000s; social networks rose, as did "microblogging" on them.
I've been a prolific user of Twitter since 2007, and I wonder if the fast-paced nature of that medium makes people less excited about both reading and writing long-form text. It sure has had that effect on me, a bit.
And yet: I've found myself wishing, on occasion, that I still maintained a blog.
Twitter (and, to a lesser extent, Mastodon) has been a double-edged sword in that I've accumulated a ton of information from a veritable firehose, but also oftentimes haven't really spent enough time processing (and sometimes, questioning) that information, finding context, and using it to grow.
This blog will, I hope, be two things, much like the soeren says of many years ago, or much like how sites such as Daring Fireball continue to operate:
- there will be occasional long-form articles
- there will be a frequent round-up of miscellanea. Like before, this will be called Chuckellania (a portmanteau coined, I believe, by fellow Myst fan myst-bert way back in the day). Unlike before, I'm thinking this will essentially be a curated form of my day's Twitter/Mastodon posts.
(What do I mean by the title? Well, this is the "the blog is back! I'm about to post a lot, regularly!" kind of post, which is often followed up by… nothing. I'm hoping that's not what will happen here, but we shall see.
"No, come back! You have more stories to tell!" A bit like xkcd 979, only not really.)
A brief aside for geekery
For the longest time, soeren says ran on WordPress, roughly between 2002 and 2010.
I then rebooted it (roughly 2010-13) based on nanoc, a static site generator from my friend Denis, a Myst fan (you may be noticing a pattern here). I never quited warmed up to that setup, which is probably more the fault of me not otherwise being very involved in Ruby any more.
So now, I'm rebooting it again, using Statiq, which apparently replaces the previous project Wyam, and which is similarly to nanoc a static site generator. But it's .NET, so it's a toolchain I work with all day anyway, so adjusting things here and there should be less of an issue.
There (clearly) isn't much of a design at this point. One thing at a time.
I'm keeping a [to-do list])http://localhost:5080/posts/2021-10-blog-todos) of sorts of things I should probably look at, but, as the last item says, it's ultimately the content that counts.
Fin
Anyway, welcome back?