A “call-to-posts” by Ur-Blogger Dave Winer (http-not-secure rebel* Mets fan) in his daily post of Friday 14th of March, on the topic of why we believe in the Writer’s Web, got me reflecting on my own long, winding and intermittent journey into blogging.

And that’s precisely the thing: it got me reflecting: thinking nebulous thoughts about why I blog, where I do it, what I’ve posted and also how easy it is not to write and post.

I’m an inveterate tool-excuser: I’m not writing much because there’s some niggle about Blogger, or Typepad, or Byword, or iA Writer, or Wordpress, or even my computer of the time, that gets in the way of true “flow”: there genuinely have been things that have irked me about them all - but they’re all excuses that run along the grain of procrastination. And what do we procrastinate against? Hard mental work, which is what writing and - especially, for me - editing is.

Getting from a nebulous idea to a cogent narrative that somebody might read is a challenge that, after my day job in engineering, raising the family, keeping up with the hobbies in music and occasional sport, and all, I’m often not quite up to. If I end up writing at all, it’s dabbling and drafting more than publishing. News and streaming sites provide the easy outs, the opium for the masses that I all too readily slide into.

Form and function

I was attracted by the idea of the short-form posting of then Twitter, now Mastodon and Bluesky. But I found that I had nothing to say of sufficient expertise (I can’t easily talk about what I develop at work, for example), or pithily humorous to match the big posters - and I also discovered an internal dread of going viral. It turns out that I don’t really want any of my posts to “blow up”.

Equally, I dislike the idea of newsletters, since I don’t want to push my ideas on anybody else, taking up their valuable time with things that don’t really grab them.

Blogging, then, is perfect for me, since I can imagine my readers, without needing to know that they exist or will read anything. Those that do want to get in touch regarding a particular post know how to, and anything that somebody that might have linked to is happily free in the wild without needing further care or attention on my part.

The idea of form is linked to what our tools can provide (see below), but the writer needs to know that form, length and complexity are all up to them.

Sometimes just a thousand words

Being part of the “background noise” of blogging, nestled in the Writer’s Web, is liberating on the visuals side, too. There’s just sufficient additional hassle associated with adding pictures to posts that I really need to know that they are relevant, or are perhaps the focus of a short post, rather than being a tactic to garner attention (and distract at the same time), for me to add them to a post.

This means that I can focus more on my writing then, when I feel that the content is there, on finding relevant titles and headers to collate ideas together, confirming the structure that evolved out of that flurry of ideas and typing.

Tools and flow

I mentioned at the outset my perennial dissatisfaction with my blogging toolsets: I’m happy to report that I feel settled using the Micro.blog platform, posting to my own site. The topic of where I draft still crops up (I’m actually writing this directly in the Micro.blog web interface), but I’ve whittled things down to a few tools, depending mostly on whether I’m just “splashing” (as here) or if I’m composing and researching, as with many of my engineering posts, for which I’ll typically use an offline editor linked to a cloud sync service.

Of course, the best tool is inside us first of all: the motivation and concentration to compose. The actual hammers and chisels should, as it were, get out of the way… which is, perhaps counterintuitively, where their design is important. They should be (for me!) simple (Markdown, for example), reactive and reliable. Not every tool matches every person, which is perhaps why I spent so long in my unsettled state, but with those questions now largely out of the way, and Dave’s clarion call acting as a focal point for me, I can perhaps get back to writing more.

But now - it’s time to pack up and head off to a trombone quartet rehearsal. See you in the next post.

*edit: linked to a post clarifying Dave’s stance on http(s), and apologising for misrepresenting him

Every so often, an internal unease about my blogging pace bubbles up inside me and I need to “do something” about it. That something usually manifests as an incessant thinking and testing and tweaking and resetting of my writing tools and environments, which, as an effective, comfortable and seemingly “proactive” form of procrastination, has so often taken priority over expending my energies on the actual content, on what I want to say. At least here, finally, I actually acted on that need, and ended up both writing and posting about that need. So, congrats to me….

Just write, right?

There are so, so many options - too many! And I’ve tried many, too many of them! I can boil the overall situation down to two key perspectives:

• the writing tool
• saving and sychronisation

These are joined (in both senses) by a third point

• the availability and accessibility of my writing data

Let’s start with this third one, whilst acknowledging that I didn’t mention the final step - publishing - since that’s another topic altogether (with too many options).

Where I write

I write in many locations on many clients, but this topic I can also condense down to two “locations”:

• on my PCs, and
• on mobile.

My PCs are:

• a Windows workstation
• an Apple laptop
• a Linux laptop that I occasionally dabble with (but which rarely strays from home)

Offline tools?

Yes, I’ve tried Word (which is now more onliney than ever) and LibreOffice - but I prefer the simplicity of those minimal writing editors, and not having to worry if my format will work OK in another app. I have opened Pages on my Apple laptop, but mostly, in the past, to let my then young youngest daughter type away without doing any damage to anything else I might have had open.

On the go?

So, what do I do when I’m not at my desk, or propped up by multiple layers of pillows on my bed with a laptop on my knees?

I long harboured the dream of being able to continue writing and editing when on my phone, or syncing at home and then continuing offline on the tablet - but, really, I write best, most fluently, with a physical keyboard. And the Windows tablet’s virtual keyboard is so truly terrible at this that it’s actually a clarifying attribute.

My solution here, which I still need to formalise, will be to read on the smaller, keyboardless machines, and to limit myself to jotting down notes in another app to apply later, when I’m back on a real screen and have a real editor in front of me. Working in this way is often better for the time to reflect and reassess those jotted ideas.

On the go can also mean having a web interface. Whilst I have for now rejected the online tools, I remain open to again trying out browser-based Markdown editors with access to Dropbox. This sounds pretty hairy when written out like this, but it’s true - sometimes I have the urge to edit a piece or write something new during a lunchtime break at work, and a quick switch to a web interface is the best way of doing that. I’m open to giving Stack Edit or Dillinger another go. Proton doesn’t offer any of these integrations, to my knowledge, as yet. That’s perhaps to its privacy and security advantage - I’ll have to research that a little more.

Where does that leave me?

It leaves me with my current setup:

• Dropbox having the edge over Proton for its integrations and availability on Linux
• Markdown being the perfect editing tool for me, with enough options out there for me to work on any platform
• On mobile, just reading and jotting notes for editing into the main draft later

It also now leaves me without an excuse for researching tools over writing (§).

Can I survive without that? We’ll have to see!

(§) No, it doesn’t

Really starting to think of creating my own, eponymous, domain, following my prior experience with switching services, and the logic from micro.blog’s Manton Reece in his online book Indie Microblogging

Domain names are so important because they exist at a layer above any web hosting platforms. If you’re no longer happy with your web host, or they go out of business, it’s your domain name that allows you to move to another web host without breaking URLs, so that readers can still find your content. This level of indirection makes your content portable, which makes it your own.

A title?

A blog post?

I’m an inveterate tinkerer with a seemingly innate inability to forget the tools and processes, to concentrate on the message, story or narrative that I want to impart.

So I’m no back to trying out Byword on the Mac - back to the rather appealing white text on black (well, a strangely relaxing but equally distracting washed-out green-black that highlights the backlighting system on the display, with all its patches of lighter and darker black, redolent of swimming in a lake with its warmer and cooler patches of water).

I still love the idea of distraction-free typing - but I keep on getting tied up with the mechanics of saving and exporting these markdown files.

EXCEPT: I’ve just discovered that Byword can publish to Evernote, which is rather a nice little feature, now that I think of it. And it can publish to Blogger… where I’ve had an account and a blog for ages.

So Byword really is right for tapping out those disjointed nightly thoughts (which I have allowed myself all too rarely of late).

Parentheses - the jotter’s best friend, a reader’s worst enemy.

And now… do you know what? I’m revising this note on my Surface tablet, in Markdown via Dropbox, gradually escaping Microsoft Office’s orbit once again (or at least continuing my potentially hopeless task of reducing my dependency on the giants of software, Microsoft, Google and the like.) All I need now is to see if this edit truly makes it back to Byword, to continue my light on dark theme fad of today…

By golly, it works, even if nobody can understand what I just wrote above. _____________________________________________________________

So if this document is to become part of my lifestream, what message does it contain? What clues to my person does it hide more than it reveals? Most likely hints of the permanent dreamer: someone who feels the desire to write - to lose himself in writing - but isn’t quite capable of entering that world fully in mind and body. Someone with too many thoughts parked in his head, all of them just slightly too amorphous to write down in any meaningful way. Someone suffering from - and enjoying too much - diversions manifold.

This blog looks to be in grave danger of becoming an orphan; no writer to care for it, only the occasional glance in from human readers and data mining bots as they continue moving swiftly on to other digital destinations, only Google’s server farm keeping it from sinking into the digital abyss. A blogging pause has happened here before, of course, as noted in my Blogging State Of the Union post from October 2012.  I’ve again not posted here for several months, obviously because nothing of interest has happened to me in that time.

Perhaps that’s right. The day-to-day has been pretty overwhelming and I’ve found that whilst trying to keep my engineering blog a little more lively, there’s simply not been the headroom, or quiet time, or energy to work on this here blog. But what about the content? Has that been lacking, too? Thankfully, I think not.

What have I been up to since Shanghai? Well, I played in another symphony orchestra concert (Gershwin, Shostakovitch and Rachmaninov’s 3rd Symphony). I remixed a Jamiroquai track for their 20th anniversary remix competition, we were served notice and had to find a new house to live in, I started jogging again… and again…, I worked, and took part in general family life.

Over the Easter holidays, I enjoyed visits to the Steim Automuseum and to the Deutsche Phonographisches Museum - which I will describe in another post - and I worked.

So, lots of excuses not to keep this blog ticking over: many of those excuses could easily have been made into entries in this online diary of mine, building up my insignificant history, for as long as the Blogger servers and HTML continue…

…anyway, enough mulling and pondering, enough slumping into sofas, and onwards with the writing!

I think, after more than 18 months of maintaining this online presence, I can now confirm that blogging is not a trivial activity. Translating thoughts to series of words that have both meaning and flow can be surprisingly hard work. Perhaps I make too much of a meal of it, revising and editing my posts to the point of never finishing them, but neither am I comfortable with the splash and dash method: a blog is a document of some permanence, and is therefore worthy of being done correctly. Whilst blog posts can (and, really, should) be edited after publication, I still hold to the old concept of the publishing date bearing some relation to the date of an particular thought or event.

Still, jamais être content is a burden (umm, that’s content in the sense of satisfaction, rather than information). I can see eight unpublished drafts listed behind the scenes of this blog, plus another two or three on my On Engineering blog. It’s manageable, but there are strong indications that I’m not a great finisher. I would by no means call myself a perfectionist, but there’s something that blocks me from hitting that post button.