Blogging again

Let's try writing again!

I used to write a lot, on paper, in documents and on the internet. However, due to trans reasons, most of those posts are deleted or lost to the aether. The entire reason I started up this new blog page is because there's a particular post that I wanted to revive, and which I now believe is lost to time. Sigh.

Either way, I can't let all this effort go to waste, so here's a little explanation of why I'm writing, what I plan on writing, and what tools I'm using to facilitate the putting of words from my head into the bits on your screen.

Since the space year 1999, or whenever I first started using the internet, I've enjoyed reading blogs and news feeds. I really do think that RSS is king, it's a simple way of collating your interests, and I use Reeder and Feedbin to consume a lot of my written media.

Full disclosure, I'm writing this post during my second bout with Covid-19, which has me feeling a little loopy and low energy.

Some of my favorite recent discoveries are Xe's Blog, and Brr. They're not ground breaking, but just comfortable reads about niche topics. I especially enjoy Xe's discussion style, and so I wanted to replicate something similar in my own blog, hence, my replicating it through the Foxtrot character.

I'm a big fan of the minimal style, although I understand it has its place. I take my notes in Obsidian using Markdown, so using a markdown based blogging platform made sense. I can pretty much write my posts and notes in Obsidian and straight copy them into a file. It also means my posts should be fairly easy to move to another platform should a need arise.

I stumbled across Videah's Blog on mastodon via a repost, and really dug the aesthetic. I haven't completely copied their theme, but there's some heavy inspiration in the callout code as well as using Giscus for the comments. Seeing them using Zola made a lot of sense with my workflow, and they have the source to their theme Sigmund available. Although in my experimentation it would need some work to de-videah it. Instead, I use a modified version of the Terminimal theme. Modified for myself enough that I don't reasonably see the point in forking it. I am new to Zola, however, so there may be nicer ways of overriding the base styles that I should use instead.

You can find the source to the blogging part of my website here. Feel free to use and modify it, although I'm sure I'll be doing plenty of tweaking to it over the months/years.

The Content

Here comes the content
It's a beautiful day
To stay inside
Bo Burnham

I feel like Social Media these days is a neverending stream of consciousness. It is the firehose of thoughts. I am more guilty of this than most, at my peak I was posting several times a day whatever was on my mind. It got me in trouble a lot. It also led to interesting work, so it's not without merit.

This blog will be for longer-form content. Content that can't fit into a single mastodon post, or a tweet. Content that would probably be obnoxious even if made into an entire thread. It will likely contain mixed media, images, videos and files, links and references. It's for more nuance than typical social media. Though I'll still enable comments just in case.

I have a fair number of posts planned, some from the Vaults, that I'll retroactively add to the website, and some brand new pieces that I have opinions on. In the past few years, I stopped sharing a lot of my thoughts online, and I would like to make a return to that. I haven't stopped making cool shit, and I haven't stopped having opinions on things, I just stopped talking about it. I'd like to change that.

That being said, this is a new thing. I don't know what this will become, and I'm looking forward to finding my voice, my style, and what I enjoy talking about.

Let's create some content.