Bring Back Personal Blogging

From Monique Judge, writing for The Verge:

In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were the original social web. We built community. We found our people. We wrote personally. We wrote frequently. We self-policed, and we linked to each other so that newbies could discover new and good blogs.

The best blogs gave us a glimpse into the life of someone we “knew” online. Good storytelling, coupled with a lively discussion afterward, kept us coming back for more day after day.

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2022 Year in Review

It’s December 31st again! Every year, it seems like things move faster and faster. I could have sworn that it was just summer, but Christmas has already come and gone, and we’re almost to a new year! And that means, following a tradition I started in 2017, it’s time for my yearly review!

A brief note before I begin: instead of walking through the highlights of my year in sequence (as if on a timeline), I’ve decided this year to talk about some major changes I’ve made/implemented over the past year.

My Search for the Perfect Note-Taking Solution

Warning: I have no conclusions in this blog post. These are just my somewhat-rambling thoughts on a topic that I spend way too much time thinking about.

Introduction

I have a love/hate relationship with note-taking apps. I’ve been trying out different solutions for over a decade at this point, but have yet to ever feel perfectly at home with any system I’ve tried, which leaves me constantly looking for improvements instead of just settling in and using my system.

A New Linux Laptop...

I told myself this day would never come. There was no reason for me to own a Linux laptop. My M1 MacBook Pro was the perfect mobile computing option: fast, nearly-infinite battery life, and extremely capable. Linux laptops always need babied, and never seem to work when you need them to. My MacBook was always functional whenever I needed it…

…And I’m writing this post from a laptop running Linux that I’ve now owned for a little over 24 hours. Why?

Thoughts on Hugo after 21 Months

A little over 21 months ago, I finally scratched the itch that I’d had off and on for years to migrate my website to a static site generator (SSG). I wrote about migrating from Wordpress to Hugo when I made the change, and overall, I’ve been pretty happy with the results. My website and blog feel more responsive than they have in years, everything has been very reliable, and I know that all of my content is safely stored in a version control system I trust (Git), and in a format that is relatively portable (Markdown).

The Apple Store Time Machine

Michael Steeber:

The Apple Store Time Machine is a celebration of the places and products that have shaped our lives for more than twenty years. This interactive experience recreates memorable moments in Apple history with painstaking detail and historical accuracy.

I spent some time exploring the Time Machine Michael created this afternoon, and the level of detail is absolutely astonishing. I highly recommend downloading this and reliving some of Apple’s history.

Tag Update

For a while now I’ve been considering splitting posts on my site into different categories, primarily to allow myself more freedom in the type of content I author, while also allowing readers to filter out only the posts they are interested in seeing. To that end, moving forward, I will be attaching one or more tags to each of my posts.

If you are interested in only following a specific type of content, you can navigate to the tags page (also now located in the site menu), where you will find posts separated by the tags I’ve assigned. For those who use RSS, you can navigate to the tag you are interested in, and then add /index.xml to the end of the URL to get the feed for only that tag.