For years now, I've wanted to turn this blog into a place to write Big Serious Entries with fancy layouts and lots of words & images. I thought that would get me somewhere interesting. But, it turns out, that's a pretty heavy squelch filter on getting things out of my brain and onto the web. I just don't have the energy or follow-through to come up with Big Serious Entries all that often.
What I do have is a lot of little things that I could let tumble out of my ADHD brain. I used to do more of that here - but since the advent of Twitter, way back in 2006, I allowed most of that to be shunted over there. And when I finally abandoned Twitter in 2022, that brain spew more fully moved to Mastodon.
Except, not entirely. Twitter and Mastodon are mostly good for tiny things. Not medium or long things. Or things that start small and grow with further thought throughout a day or a week. My blog could be good at that, though. So, I'm reworking the layout and how I can write entries to better accomodate that and dovetail into my habits.
I like the way Dave Winer and Simon Willison run their blogs. They riff throughout the day with notions of various length and format - sometimes as short as a toot and sometimes expanding out into full essays. They've both done this for years and years, and they've done well at it. So, I'm going to shamelessly steal some of their ideas and plonk them down here.
But, I'm also going to try a few of my own ideas. Like, Simon runs his blog as a Django app and Dave writes in OPML. Personally, I like my Easy-Blog Oven and I like writing in Markdown.
One thing I don't like is tediously opening a new Markdown file every time I might have a wild idea, though. That's a thing that Dave's OPML Editor had going for it, back when I blogged with it: You opened one outline for the whole day and just let ideas tumble into it over the hours. (Hmm, I want a screenshot here. I need to figure out how to paste one in.)
These days, my stand-in for the OPML Editor is Obsidian. In some ways, it's more cumbersome for outlining than OPML, but it does other things I like. So, I've come up with this goofy file format to open just one file per day and compose multiple entries in that file.
Basically, it's markdown, but if I start a line with ASCII-art scissors (i.e. 8<) then my Easy-Blog Oven will chop that file up into separate entries. I can also include a bit of JSON in there for post metadata.
No entry in the file is final, things may expand and contract and bud off into new entries over time. I'll probably let them alone after midnight, though. That might cause some churn in my RSS feeds, so I may eventually set them to a 24-hour delay. I don't know, I'm still thinking.
If I get really ambitious, I'll rig up some machinery to automatically publish as I write in an Obsidian tab. But, that's some hackery for the days ahead. For now, I just want to get these changes pushed out into the world before I wander off after something else shiny.
(Edit: I wrote a script that runs in a cronjob that pushes my edits from Obsidian to GitHub. That's all it really took, just one more sproingy bit atop the Rube Goldberg machine.)
