Friday, January 14, 2022

Early last November, in Welcome back, I guess, I wrote this:

If I'm being honest, I'll admit that this is just an excuse to play with some old toys and experiment with new ones.

See also: Sometimes I change my mind

Let's look at how it's going with my Blogging With Tinderbox experiment.

First, it's been a ton of fun wrangling Tinderbox into generating a nice-looking blog that fits my particular way of blogging. I was inspired after trying Dave Winer's Drummer blogging tool. Tinderbox is ridiculously flexible and powerful and fun, and made this blog possible.

I love outliners, and this site is built using Tinderbox's powerful version of outliner. All the cool new kids are using outlines, too.

Keeping my "Daybook" type entries in the same Tinderbox file as my blog posts is pretty great. It lets me see everything all at once. I can link, collect, arrange, and analyze everything I write, whether public or private. This is not a small thing, it will likely become more useful over time.

So, I'll be sticking with Tinderbox for my daily notes blogging, then? Not so fast.

The mechanisms for generating this blog out of Tinderbox are fragile. More than once in the past week, I've broken large portions of the site after making what I thought to be a minor change to a template or Agent. Debugging it took quite some time. It makes me nervous.

Links are powerful but strange in Tinderbox. For a simple blog, I don't need powerful. I need them to be easily created and simple to edit. I don't find them to be.

The elephant in the room is Emacs, and, more specifically, Org mode. You see, as much as I like managing and processing notes in Tinderbox, I don't love writing in it. Notes in Tinderbox are rich text. Sure, technically you can have them behave as if they're Markdown, but doing so is definitely swimming upstream. Tinderbox does a good job of converting rich notes into HTML, and even offers control over how formatting is rendered. It's all very clever. However, it's a long way from plain text, and I prefer plain text for writing. And I very much enjoy writing plain text in Emacs.

I haven't decided yet which way I'll be taking this blog. For the moment, I like the results so much that I'm happy using Tinderbox. But I feel the pull of Emacs and the simplicity of Org mode and Markdown. I'm still hoping to find a way to have both.

I've tweaked the design here just a little. The header graphic is back. I got bored with just a big, blue rectangle. We'll see how long I like it this way. Paragraph and post spacing have been adjusted to (I hope) make it easier to read and scan. Also, the titled posts titles are no longer blue. There was too much blue. This makes "blue is a link" inconsistent, but hopefully not troublingly inconsistent.

Occasionally, the internet becomes littered with some latest fad, meme, or topic. It peppers my feeds and I want it to stop. Then, I realize that I scroll past dozens of things I'm uninterested in every day. It's just as easy to simply scroll past this new thing as well.

I'm already not digging my crosspost-everything-to-copingmechanism idea. Why am I doing that again? It only enables me to waffle on where I post things.

Let's look at my best current blogging options:

A. Short, daily notes at daily.baty.net. I could use Tinderbox or Emacs for this. Longer posts and photos would go to copingmechanism.com. This would mean a different WordPress theme. The "magazine" styled theme doesn't work well for a combination of photo and text posts.

B. Short and longer posts at daily.baty.net. Photography posts at copingmechanism.com. I get to keep the Hive theme, and Tinderbox makes the most sense for the daily site.

C. Short posts at daily.baty.net. Longer posts at baty.blog. Photography at copingmechanism.com. OH C'MON!

It's gotta be either A or B. And if that's the case, the cross-posting thing seems unnecessary. It's option C that prompted that whole thing. Still noodling on it.

After Reviewing my current blogging options, I've gone with "B", with a twist. I've moved it back to baty.blog. Now I'm going to go do something else before I change my mind again. Sorry for the trouble.

DHH is off the rails and, in his latest, reveals with his "both sides" argument that he doesn't understand science either.

What is science, if not an adversarial process by which we seek an ever-closer understanding of the truth through critical review from all sides? How can we follow The Science, if we do not subject it to such pressures? What kind of science do we get if we don't?

Suffering a serious bout of Subscription Fatigue today, so I decided to cancel all non-critical subscriptions. All but one of them were "Annual" plans. Canceling those doesn't feel quite as good as I'd hoped.

I would like pricing pressure for software to go up, but for subscriptions to go down. I'll happily pay $250 for a great app, but don't want to pay more than $12/year for a read-it-later service or newsletter or magazine. The number of apps I need is rather low. The number services, news, and entertainment options I need approaches infinity and I just don't have the budget for that.

You know that pretty much anyone can get a Substack, right?

Paul Ford continues to write wonderful things that I love.

The supply chain is fractal: Zoom in on your stuff and there's more stuff, ad infinitum.