Some things about blogging today.

Good Enough

Kev Quirk writes about whether his current blogging setup would ever be "good enough":

So I’m already in this frame of mind where I’m considering other options for my blog. It’s just a thing I do at this point; the constant hunt for perfection– my blogging utopia — is like a perpetual motion engine in my brain. It wont bloody stop.

I can sympathize. The urge to constantly tinker with one's blogging setup is difficult to resist for me as well. Even back when I was on Wordpress I would constantly be switching themes and updating features.

Recently I've even been tempted to switch back to something off-the-shelf like Wordpress from my current custom blogging system, mainly because something like Wordpress would probably be less effort overall to maintain. The notion passes quickly, as I really like my current setup, despite its flaws.

If you just want to write on a blog with minimal fuss, then using available tools like Wordpress or Micro.blog or Hugo or Jekyll or whatever is totally fine! But if you have highly specific ideas about how you want your blogging setup to be (i.e. people like me or Kev Quirk above), these pre-built softwares will never get you 100% of the way there. , using one of these tools is understandable There's nothing like a custom-built system to get you as close as possible to the ideal blogging setup you have in your head.

Granted, even my current setup is probably only maybe 95% there at best - there are still so many things I want to do/tweak/add/etc! But at least the barrier there is just my will to figure out exactly how I want things and the effort to implement it - and that effort is something I enjoy doing, as a hobby even, so it's all fine. The alternative is to be constantly tinkering with Wordpress or Hugo whatever - software built for general purpose and not necessarily easily tamed to your whims and running on unfamiliar codebases. At least if I get frustrated with my custom setup, the developer is incredibly responsive and is always willing to change the software for my needs!

(Also, the constant tinkering makes for good blog post material!)

That is more than "good enough" for me!

What About Now?

I read this thread on Masto about Now Pages and it mentioned how man listed now pages on Sivers' site are no longer regularly maintained, and someone mentioned that their now page is automatically updated and I thought "That's cool, I should do that!" and then I looked at my now page today and found out that mine was already dynamically updating with recent tracks listened to, games played, movies watched, etc. Good job past me! I think the content still needed an update though; previously I was adding new notes with the tag "current-status" to update the body of the now page, but I haven't been using that tag since May 2021! Oops. Decided to change the now page to instead show my latest weeknotes, which I always write and will give a good overview of what I'm doing now. So my now page now has updated content weekly!

Although this is "good enough" for now, I suspect the format and content of the now page is one of those things that I will be revisiting constantly in the future!