I’m trying to write more, but who for?

What I did when I wanted to make the Hugo branch of this blog’s repository main, without using a merge.

A post reflecting on the highs and lows of 2023, including travel, books, work, movies etc.

It might have been a good idea to write all the reviews prior to publishing this summary. You’ll get ten eventually, I promise.

Despite my best intentions, I didn’t manage to continue writing posts after the first day of 2022! But perhaps now I can try again as an excuse to test my blogging set up on my new computer.

This post explains some of the modifications I made to a minimal Jekyll theme to get this blog as I wanted it. This blog (currently) uses the excellent Sidey theme by Ronalds Vilciņš. His site looks eerily similar to this one, at least at time of writing. The theme is pretty minimal in terms of features (and appearance) but it scores well on the Google Page Speed test. The features I added have increased the build time, but have not affected the speed of the site in terms of the page speed test.

Back in 2012 I wrote a post listing my ambitions for the future. Well it’s the future now isn’t it? Almost. After all, I’m a whole new person now. Anyway it’s probably time to take stock. Have I achieved any of them? Have any of my ambitions changed? What’s replaced the things that I’ve decided not to worry about? What has come after the things I managed to do? First off, here’s my justification for writing the list in the original post:

As much as I hate to write about writing, especially when I write so infrequently, I feel I need to reboot this blog. I wrote so few posts in recent months I considered giving up altogether. I’ve been stressed. Sometimes this manifests in being unable to sleep. Sometimes it manifests in all my interests and ideas seeming to be completely pointless. Sometimes one of those precedes the other. Sometimes it works vice versa.

This year promises to be exciting so this week I tried to buy a diary. One of those day-to-a-page affairs for scribbling down all the things I’ve seen and learned about. I thought they might be cheap now the calendar is turning to February. No such luck. There were a few week-to-view diaries going for half price in Waterstones but nothing suitable for my needs. I have lots of Field Notes notebooks if my urge to write gets too much to resist.

In my last post, I wrote about hills. I tried to use them as a metaphor to explain nagging sense of incompletion when you single out one activity over another. The feeling that there’s always a more exciting hill off in the distance to go climb, instead of the one you’re on. I said my next post would be about how to pick between different options, particularly when you have many to choose from.

I’m a big fan of books. The way they transport you away to other places and so on. As repositories of knowledge and adventure they can’t be beat. I can think of no better way out of an existential fix than reading. The trouble is I tend to hoard them. I’ve posted pictures of book stacks before (on more than one occasion). I could probably repeat that every month if I wanted to, perhaps even more often.

Moving the blog to Jekyll (again, sort of) Et voila, my blog lives! In a new body (Jekyll) and at a new location. The Process I set up Jekyll on my MacBook Air after loads of initial problems with installing the theme and getting assorted Ruby gems installed and working. Stack Overflow is a friend for life now. By way of comparison, getting things up and running on my new Mac was simple.

A little man wearing a bow tie, and possibly a fez, scurries into the middle of the frame clutching a clapboard. Breathing heavily he hoists the clapboard up to chest height. He holds the clapper up then brings down while slurring "This is a blog post about not having a clue, take 43". He exits to the right of the frame. My feet are hot. The bed seems too small. Why are my feet always too hot on nights like these?

I am writing a long post that I will either publish as one long post (about five or six thousand words) or as about seven smaller ones each closer to the average post length of about eight hundred words. I have to get it out-of-the-way soon as my mind needs to focus on my health economics essay. It is hard to write short posts to a timetable, let alone churn out long posts on a regular basis.

A brief rant about Facebook: I hate the fact that the news feed defaults to “Top Stories” even though I change it back to “Most Recent” every time I log in. It’s a horrible pattern of user abuse that needs to stop. Time is time and that is that. So why does Facebook feel the need to jiggle things about into a random order? Well most of you have that mobile phone app of theirs that sucks your battery and your data allowance like crazy (mainly by auto-playing videos like a dick).