4 ms·

Any tips for avoiding the urge to spend time setting up a fancy SSG and playing with that and never actually writing? I've done that a few times over the years.

• Linell 4y ago
  I wrote about my experience with this here: https://thelinell.com/The-Notion-Experiment-8191f33eaa864469bca03b3307f4c9b1 https://thelinell.com/The-Notion-Experiment-8191f33eaa864469... The main idea for me was to just reduce the barrier to entry so that writing more was too easy to avoid. I already use Notion for taking notes throughout the day, so transitioning to also jotting down blog thoughts has been very easy and has increased the amount of writing that I do.
  • dsr_ 4y ago
    When I decrease the number of steps to go from thinking about a blog entry to publishing it, that increases my willingness to blog. Current steps: - make newpost NAME='even a temporary title is ok, but a permanent one is better' That creates a file with the headers and a couple of skeletal bits in the right place, then opens it in my editor. - make rsync That publishes it.
  • sebstefan 4y ago
    The blog is great, I love the layout with the tags, is it static? If it's open source I'd like to see how it's done
    • xena 4y ago
      AFAICT this is just Notion with a custom domain.
• xena 4y ago
  Every time I get anxiety, I write one blogpost. I get a lot of anxiety. But really just work on writing or ideas for writing for half an hour every day. Even if you just write "I have nothing to write about today". Don't be afraid to just keep showing up.
  • mattgreenrocks 4y ago
    Love this advice. Thank you for your blog.
• callahad 4y ago
  I'm not sure Xe is the right person to ask about avoiding playing with the site's backend: https://xeiaso.net/blog/series/site-update https://xeiaso.net/blog/series/site-update ;-) (Maybe the trick is: if you must tinker, also turn that tinkering into writing?)
  • xena 4y ago
    Bingo! Most of the tinkering is aimed at helping me make the site better. In essence, my site is a bunch of smaller projects that add up into one bigger project. If you end up doing something cool with your blog, while you're working on the true usecase (for example, my stream VOD page: https://xeiaso.net/vods https://xeiaso.net/vods) you can write about what you learned along the way (https://xeiaso.net/blog/hls-experiment https://xeiaso.net/blog/hls-experiment and https://xeiaso.net/blog/video-compression https://xeiaso.net/blog/video-compression). Most of my site update posts are just my notes from tinkering with things turned into prose.
  • ilyt 4y ago
    Mine was fueled mostly with pure hatred of wordpress
• bmitc 4y ago
  My recommendation would be to use either Jekyll or just go with Notion. I am allergic to setting up a bunch of stuff and just wanted to start writing. So I am using Jekyll's default Minima theme with some small adjustments, mainly to render MathJax and Mermaid diagrams in my posts. There was some initial hacking, but now I got it setup with a Docker devcontainer with VS Code, so it's as easy as pulling down the repository, and then starting to write. I have only written one article at the moment, but I am glad I got started with it. I hope to keep adding to it over time and have a few articles in the works.
  • xena 4y ago
    I second this. The only reason my blog is so complicated is that I get so much traffic that I have to overengineer it. Your blog doesn't need to be as complicated. Underthink things now so you can overthink them later. A friend of mine wasn't satisfied with Hakyll and ended up making her own thing on top of Deno and Fresh: https://twilightsparkle.fly.dev/ https://twilightsparkle.fly.dev/, and she's super happy with that now. Please keep at it with writing! It's a super valuable skill that so few people actually use. It really sets you apart in the job market and is so underrated from a professional standpoint.
• sshine 4y ago
  My way around just toying with site generators and actually write was: Start by writing to yourself. I started with writing down ideas in a private markdown system. (I’d recommend https://obsidian.md https://obsidian.md today.) I became less self-conscious about my target audience was myself. It also became easier to make assumptions about what they (I) know, which is still a game of “will I understand this in a year or two?” For me, writing about tech to a near-future version of myself was the beginning. Another tip: You may be in control of your documents (you maintain them, not some online system you don’t own), but if you use someone else’s blog platform, you won’t have a chance to rabbit-hole the site making. There’s something liberating about only caring about the content, not the layout. For some subjects, it helps to write under a pseudonym, because you can experiment with what’s on your mind and not how people will treat you based on what you say. I’ve wanted to write about things like pornography and past jobs (those are unrelated, hehe), but I don’t want to upset past colleagues or seem obsessed about pornography.
• alin23 4y ago
  Maybe rely on people that have done the tinkering already. For example after trying multiple SSGs, I eventually settled on the simplest combination for me: Caddy with markdown files Wrote about it here: https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/How%20I%20write%20this%20blog%20on%20my%20iPhone%20in%20a%20train https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/How%20I%20write%20this%20blog... I already had Caddy running for lunar.fyi and lowtechguys.com so it felt simple to just add some lines in the Caddy file and start writing words in .md files.