It's the tools. Or is it?

Dave Rogers posted earlier about Blogging with Tinderbox. His thoughts mostly echo my own. In it, he says that I am more "a 'tool is the object' kind of guy". I cringed for a moment at this, but he's absolutely right. I want to be a person who simply chooses the correct tool for the thing that they want to make, but I'm not that person. I sometimes don't make anything at all until I find some new tool to make it with. Sure, that's probably backwards and wrong, but I can't help it. I love trying software, cameras, pens, and devices of all kinds. Studying how they solve problems is fun for me.

I have a long history of finding new ways of making words appear on the internet. I've used so many tools for so many things that I feel I have a pretty broad perspective of what's available.

Blogging tools are everywhere. It's a mature category, yet new ones show up all the time. If you don't like one of them, find another. Goodness knows I've done plenty of that 😀.

I don't know if anyone would put Tinderbox on their short list of blogging tools. That's a shame, really, because it fills a niche but useful category. I'm not even sure how to define it. Dave's post lists a few reasons one might use Tinderbox for blogging, but for me it's that Tinderbox is the single most useful and flexible Mac app I've ever used. For a long time, I used it for everything, including my blog.

A brief foray into Linux and the discovery of Emacs and Org-mode pulled me away from using Tinderbox for everything, but there's nothing like its combination of Map, Hyperbolic, and Timeline views of the same information, so I still use it for certain things. Every time I launch Tinderbox I'm reminded that it can do just about anything, including creating a nice blog.

When I'm in an Emacs mood, it sucks up all my attention. Once you're all-in with Emacs, it's difficult to use anything else. So I'll move by blog to Hugo or Kirby or some other blogging platform that uses plain text files.

After a while, text file fatigue sets in and I do something like fire up a WordPress instance. That's gross, so then I'll launch my Blog.tbx file and remember how damn good Tinderbox is at everything, including generating a static website/blog. So I start typing, like I'm doing right now.

I don't even know what I came here to say, honestly. Probably that tools are important to me, and Tinderbox is a good one.