A challenge of blog questions
My friend Kris Howard did the blog questions challenge thing. She tagged me at the end. Which is funny, because she kicked off her post with:
Blogging is back, baby!
And I wouldn't say I blogged. But sure, why not.
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
It was early 2000 and a bunch of my friends were already doing it. Sept 11 2002 is the first actual hard evidence I can find in my archives. 1740280020 to be exact. I had some kind of web presence before that. I believe I was on a free virtualhost (something called 'stibs' apparently) running a bespoke engine. That host vanished into the ether and took a bunch of data with it. Before then I had some hand-written html thing that I can barely remember but never the less makes me cringe. But that first post in my extant archives was when I bought my own domain, hosted on a service I paid for, and got enthusiastic.
I said a bunch of friends were already blogging. I met them all through a USENET group, alt.fan.eddings Actually, how about Guardians of the West as that link, endearingly still up after all these years. Not really terrifically in touch with any of them any longer. Some of them I am unsure I ever knew the names their mum knew them by. By Stuart Langridge/sil, Nicholas Avernell, Paul Freeman, Nick Boalch, and Jason Williams. There were a ton of others but time is unfriendly.
TIL I can still remember the name of the python blog engine sil created, Vellum.
I suspect I mostly got into blogging because I had been writing a cringingly bad Eddings fanfic. I'm not linking to it, but I know it is out there still. I lost patience with my inability to write an ending. So I kind of just did a smash cut ending that resolved nothing. And then I had nothing to do.
But we were all very enthusiastic. Nowadays what we were doing was referred to as Indieweb. Along with Simon Willison and Ian Hickson, sil published a spec for Pingback, which I seem to remember implementing while sitting in a school hall on a dance eisteddfod weekend, between Emily's performances. We were doing semantic web shit when semantic web was becoming a concept people recognised. I had opinions on RSS vs Atom 🙄🙄 All very idealistic. Shit went very sideways for all that exactly a year before I started avocadia.
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?
Hand-rolled. This is at least my fourth hand-rolled engine now. avocadia.net started with a PHP engine. There might have been a cruder (I say that tentatively because I have recently read the copy of the engine I still have and...well, it's something) version before that. I was always evolving it though. So you couldn't really say there was a definitive break.
Before avocadia was hand-written html. After avocadia was a Ruby on Rails (not linking because fuck dhh) version. It was almost your standard second system, but the intention was to learn a web development engine that was becoming fashionable. I was building a template engine as well, ISTR, but it never really worked well. fcgi was tetchy on Dreamhost as well, and RoR really needed fcgi.
Sometime around then Twitter came out. I used to write a lot. A lot of silly ephemeral stuff. I may or may not have had a moment where I realised I didn't like what I was writing. Can't really and it's not like when I just gradually shifted to using Twitter I wrote anything better.
I tried to start again in 2012. That used Octopress and later jekyll (when it turned out Octopress 3.0 was never coming). That trundled along with posts every couple of months for a few years.
A bunch of things seemed to occur around the same time. I got interested in Event Sourcing after a couple of talks I saw a talk at Yow. One by Lee Campbell and another by Sebastian von Conrad . I started becoming much more radicalised and I hated the idea of giving my words to billionaires to use to sell ads. I was very hands off in my day job and I wanted to write code. I had stumbled across Micropub I realised I had completely lost touch with front end development.
So I started writing a headless cms based on an idea that I had worked on in a previous day job. It was going to be the means by which I had my own copy of everything I wrote. It would federate to the jekyll blog, to Twitter, to Mastodon. Bookmarks I created would be federated to Pinboard .
Turned out event sourcing is a terrible DX. Every tiny change took so much faffing about to support. Great idea for some domains; not so great for me. So I ripped it out, but actually what I really did was start a new engine from scratch and rescue anything I could from the wreck of the previous one. It still has no admin interface, so for posting purposes it remains headless. It still federates to Mastodon, because I cannot find the time to sit down and get ActivityPub to work properly. I gave up on the Rube Goldberg chain of shell commands and breathe holding for getting the jekyll blog updated, so now it also renders the posts. On the thing you are looking at now.
Simples.
How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?
If it is going to be just a note that I federate out to Mastodon, I write it directly in Quill and it posts to the micropub api. Same for bookmarks.
Quill has a bug. I use a micropub extension to define exactly what types of post my system excepts and what properties each of those accepts. For the notes type it doesn't handle the photos property and doesn't allow me to add a photo to short notes. So I also have an Apple Shortcut for posting short notes with an image.
If it is going to be a longer post, like this thing, I write it in a text editor on my laptop. This is being written in Obsidian. If I want to add images to a longer post I sometimes use some scripts I wrote in Postman to upload an image and get the url back so I can use it in the post. Those scripts started life as test scripts for the micropub API and now live in a collection called 'A Terrible Client'.
If I have to edit a post because I made a typo and I just can't live with it, I use micropublish.net. I don't use it for writing, particularly not if it has images, because it does something weird with photos that I still haven't taken the time to accomodate in my micropub endpoint.
I'll almost certainly never implement the client-to-server version of ActivityPub, even if I do get server-to-server working.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
I almost never write. I start longer posts but even I become bored with myself about halfway through. I post something short intended mostly for Mastodon maybe once a week. And if I come across something written on the web that I want to bookmark, I will create a new bookmark post.
Mostly when I post a short note, it is because somebody did something awful. I am posting something sardonic, something cold and arid and sarcastic, as a defense mechanism. Venting a little bit of rage allows me to maintain the balance between wanting to go to the barricades to destroy all of these awful people and record their last words before we guillotine them, and becoming black-pilled.
Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
Just publish it. Nothing I write is going to be made better by waiting. If I do wait, it'll never get posted.
What’s your favorite post on your blog? (sic)
They are no longer publicly accessible on my blog. But I wrote a bunch of 300-word flashfic years ago now. I was pretty happy with them.
I pointedly don't go back to read them because I don't want to find out they were bad.
If I wrote more I'd probably have unreservedly favourite posts.
Ok, it's not entirely true. I don't have links for them all because most of them are in my twitter archive, but most years I write a note on my wedding anniversary riffing on how my wife told me she will be murdering me on our 55th anniversary. Here's this years. Anything involving Donna is pretty much my fave.
Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?
Yeah, some.
I'll never put comment-support on this. I just don't want them. If I get ActivityPub working I might link back to replies, but I won't display them on this site. I did the whole comment thing in the 2000s and it was a shitshow then. I just don't see the point. I would like to support webmention though.
When I started allowing posts to be rendered on this site, I read back through a lot of them, and it turns out a lot of them are so of the moment that I haven't included any context at all. Like, what the actual fuck was this about? I want to be able to come back to these short posts in the few days afterwards and add some context to them. Just little notes, for myself only, on what I was reacting to.
My dedication to the idea ebbs and wanes with my mood. But I kind of wanted this blog to just be the publicly visible parts of a memex in which everything I read and write and consume is held. I have been on and off enamoured with the idea of digital second brains for decades now.
Perhaps more prosaically though, I would like to be better at design so I could make what you are looking at better. I'd like to rationalise the tag ontology to be more useful to me. I'd like to do things like archives and better slugs (/item/item/fucking-guid, come on, really?). I wanted to do Gopher and Gemini interfaces for the site, because it owuld be funny go hard on dead technology? Might as well throw nntp in there as well. I want to support Tim Berners-Lee's Solid project, because I really want to manage my own digital identity, not just my content. I waver on supporting AT Protocol.
And I want my writing/publishing system to support a lot more density. There's a few links in this post, that I added by hand. I think there should be a lot more. That day job CMS I started re-implementing was intended to take atomic pieces of information and use links and smart collections to build many, context-aware html-based applications. At the time it felt bigger more better than the Web CMSes we were using to do client work. It still does, but I never managed to live up to the dream.