Meadow - Posts tagged with blogging

A fortress called Blog

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 18:13:24 GMT

I sometimes feel that what I'm doing here is building a fortress out of words.

Gates of metaphor and battlements of simile. Spiraling towers of chained letters.

All are welcome to come, the gates are always open, but I lie immobile in the center of the main hall, my extremities strung to the floor with consonants and vowels.

All I can do is smile, and spew words, build new towers, new wings, new rooms. Tags, posts, pages, tools, they grow up around me in this my home.

The fortress alive, like a tree it grows, but its roots are not in the dirt but in my mind. From my lips escapes the wind that caresses the leaves ever upward, stretching the branches, making the sapling become a mighty oak overlooking a valley.

And in the distance I see, as through mist, through the haze of words and the approximative nature of language, other castles and fortresses, other constructions. Some bigger than mine, as kingdoms in the sky they seem to me. Others are but humble hovels. It's no matter, to me they're all beautiful and awe inspiring, the efforts of beings springing forth as ripe fruit.

And I know, that at the center of each lies one like me, chained in the deepest of hearts.

We visit each other. And walk and see and talk. Admiring, learning, that's all there is to it. Pausing here to sink into the beauty of a well placed comma, and there to listen to the singing of a rare bird, one that makes its home only here among all other possible places.

And when full, we go back and continue the labor we love, continue building and creating and expanding. For us, and for others, and for the world at large.

The doors are always open. Today you come and see and hopefully, by the end, we will both feel fuller and satisfied with a connection newly made.

Welcome to my fortress called Blog. Tomorrow it will be my turn to visit.

Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 19:30:39 GMT

I've been listening to a book called On Writing, by Stephen King. At the end of one of the chapters he gives a very prescient quote "Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around".

Holy shit. That's so true. Things happen, and we want to do other stuff. Our attention is pulled this way and that, constantly bombarded by the cool next thing, and what suffers is our art.

For most people, art only happens when we're excited about it, when there's some underlying motivation mechanism. For example, it's very common that people make a blog and their excitement about the whole thing propels them for the first weeks, months, or even years. But once the excitement splutters out, it's done. Dead. I know this is what happened to me. Many times I've felt that my blog is on some kind of life support, with me just refusing to let it go by adding pictures and cleaning up the site.

Another thing King's quote brings up is the crucial fact that we need to make space for it. It seems to say if you want to make art, then allow yourself to do it. However, making space is not as simple as that, as it goes contrary to our common impulse of just following the next thing that gives us satisfaction. It actually goes counter to either what is our nature as humans, or a deeply engrained cultural maxim.

I think another way to express this is how we need to get out of our own way. All the stuff we pile on top of ourselves is often too much, and all the overthinking, demotivation, and the well known impostor syndrome just make things harder than they need to be.

For the past few days I've been writing in my journal about my desire for picking up writing again but not really being sure where to start. I think part of the problem is that I'm aiming maybe too high? Not allowing myself to start small.

When I originally started my blog I literally didn't give a shit. I didn't care about what I wrote, I just cared about writing, about saying something, ANYTHING, no matter what it was. For a while this kept me going, writing mostly miscellaneous essays and whatnot, and only later did I start doing morning pages.

Morning pages... Beautiful in their own way, but they completely overhauled the way in which I write. I shifted to NOT doing dedicated essays but just writing random stuff in my journal, and if something nice came out, then that part would find its way into my blog with little to no editing.

But writing in a dedicated fashion is great. Writing with a goal is really hard for beginners, or at least it is for me. In morning pages, my content tends to be really rambly, going round and round. Every once in a while, a topic sticks for multiple paragraphs, and that's usually when it's something worth posting. However, I've always felt that training oneself to write about a single thing is crucial. Otherwise one has the situation that I'm in now, where I want to do stuff but I have no idea where to start or how to proceed. I can't count how many times I've Googled "how to get started with creative writing" in the past couple of months. I eventually desist when I find the answer is always "just start writing something".

In many ways, right now I'm in the perfect environment to work on my writing. Maybe that's why it cropped up? I'm on vacation, with good chunks of my evening free, and with energy. Especially in this current moment I'm in a very nice place, writing from a terrazza overlooking the center of Rome, with the Basilica of San Pietro clearly visible in the distance, arrayed in all its prettiest shades of sunset.

I'm not sure what I'm getting at. Not even sure if this will actually end up being a post on my blog—as I'm saying I want to write dedicated things but at the same time this is being created as part of my "morning pages". At the same time, why not... Though I have to admit that I've been writing a lot about writing and I don't like it that much. Why? I'm sure there's something I'm trying to express or talk myself into, but no amount of speaking is a substitute for action. Perhaps what I'm trying to do is to get so frustrated with it that I finally get off my metaphysical ass and do something about it!

What I do know is that I look back on those days of just posting for the hell of it with wistful envy.

~ 🌱

Introducing Mochi — and thoughts on analytics and webmentions

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 14:23:36 GMT

I've been working on a new personal project for some months now. It started when I migrated my blog from Bearblog to a custom, statically generated site. I'm not one to obsess about analytics (but god knows I have done so in the past) but I do care about when other people comment on the things I've written in their own blogs. I'm always happy to read what they say, be it good or bad.

There's a cool technology floating around the Indie Webs called Webmentions, that is supposed to address exactly that issue. You write a post that tags my post and then let me know about it by sending an HTTP request to my Webmentions server. Sounds awfully technical for the average non-technical user, and it is.

I spent some time researching this and saw a pretty clear pattern: webmentions have been set up for almost all sites whose authors have a technical background (often using a custom built server). But in the sphere of non-technical bloggers, almost no one has the ability to receive webmentions.

Granted, there are some cool projects out there, (most notably webmentions.io) that try to make it easy for anyone to add a webmention endpoint, all through a web UI. Still, it's not super clear how to use it. Though it's good that it exists. From what I've seen this is the service that most non-technical people use.

But all of this is about "receiving" webmentions. The sending of webmentions is actually more complex and harder to do for the average non-technical person. The best solution I found for this is webmention.app, that finds and sends webmentions for every link in a given page. Still, it's a manual process, as the user needs to go to the app every time they want webmentions to be sent. It works, but it's tedious, meaning people won't do it consistently. There's the ability to automate it, but you need to write a script, which again is a barrier for non-technical folks.

At the time I was also experimenting with different analytics services, most notably Tinylytics and Umami. Both were great but I absolutely loved Tinylytics. So clean and simple to use. No weird, complex options. I realized that up until now my experience with analytics was constrained to corporate analytics: complex platforms catering to the "marketing department" with tools to improve revenue. Here, in Tinylytics, I'd found a platform that was truly aimed at the small web, with the average personal blogger in mind.

So I set up Tinylytics on my site, but at the same time I could feel a seed starting to germinate in the back of my mind: "how does it work?" As always, I gave myself to this thought and started experimenting with how I could go about building a simple analytics platform. It turned out to be a good technical challenge: hard enough to be fun, but easy enough not to be frustrating.

Functionality wise, the first version of Mochi was pretty much a carbon copy of Tinylytics, with some minor changes to accommodate the UX to my own personal preferences. Around this point I realized that I'd built a platform that could be useful for others, but I didn't really want to make it public yet. It being so similar to Tinylytics, I felt it was "immoral". So I sat on it. I kept using it as my analytics platform on my blog, but never announced it anywhere. I told myself I would keep it private until/unless it became a drastically different platform. For some months it was relegated to the background, I kept hacking on it when I had time, inspiration, or a bug, but it otherwise stood untouched. That is, until I started to seriously consider having it support Webmentions. In the past I'd of course already heard about them and even set up a webmentions endpoint with webmentions.io, but I quickly grew discouraged with the technology, as everyone seemed to have webmentions set up, but no one was sending them. I just put it down as another failed attempt at bridging the gap between the islands that are personal blogs.

Then I somehow stumbled on the spec. "Holy shit, this is really easy to implement and it would be a great feature for Mochi"! It became apparent that any analytics platform for the indie web also needed to support both the sending and receiving of webmentions.

After some more months of hacking I think I can now say that Mochi is that platform I envisioned all those months ago. I'm making this post as an invitation to anyone that wants to try it out. The project is open source and in the near future I really want to make it possible for anyone to easily self-host it should they want to.

Anyway, that's it 🤗 if you do decide to try it out please let me know of any issues you encounter! The platform has some peculiar design choices (more on them below), and I don't know how the system will behave under stress. Currently, I'll only allow a max of 20 accounts to be created so I can see what happens, but if everything is stable then I'll quickly raise this number.

Oh, and I know some people don't like analytics. Know that you can still use the webmentions functionality without using the analytics tracker!

Notes on technical details

Mochi is built in Golang, which allows for building and distributing a single binary that's easy to deploy and lowers the entry barrier to self-hosting.

The main experiment I'm running with Mochi is the database: I'm using SQLite. This is mainly out of personal curiosity as I really want to see how the simpler SQLite holds up in this kind of application. To get around the "single concurrent writes" limitation what I'm doing is having a separate database file per user, and then there's a shared database for less common operations (e.g., user settings and webmentions). Having one DB per user turned out to be a neat idea as it also enforces privacy (data from one user is very unlikely to be shown to another), and it makes exporting and deleting a user really easy and safe (just export/delete their db file).

I think this should work, though the whole thing is still bound by the filesystem I/O speed. That's why I'm slowly increasing the allowed amount of accounts. We'll see. If it goes well I might do a follow-up post, as I think using SQLite is easier/better in most cases than requiring a more "powerful" hosted DB like PostgreSQL.

Another thing I'm experimenting with here are alternative modes of notifications. We all know that email is the golden standard, but from a developer's point of view it's so darn tedious to set up! So I thought "there are so many other communication services out there, why not use one of those?". So, for Mochi, I've initially decided to send notifications through a Discord bot. Not only is it free (sending emails can get expensive) but it was also extremely easy to set up, and it also gave me a chance to play with the Discord bot API 😊

Of course, the drawback here is that not everyone uses Discord, while most people do have email. But well, that's the benefit of building something that's "free", I can do what I want and I don't have any stakeholders telling me to do otherwise. I might start adding other notification backends in the future (Telegram? Mastodon?)

Blog Question Challenge 2025

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 16:19:29 GMT

I've seen this Blog Question Challenge going around for a while now, and recently Brandon was nice enough to challenge me! I have no idea where or why the whole thing started, but here we are. I think this came at a perfect time, as I'm trying to re-establish a blogging practice. It's nice having something like this since writing on a fixed outline is easy, almost like eating a cookie. It means I don't really need to think much about what the post will be about, as that has already been decided and outlined for me.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I've had many blogs, and all of them started for the same reason: the desire to write. Especially this last one, on which I write under the name of Meadow, I began because I felt this immense internal pressure to create something. I felt like I was going to burst. Serendipitously, around that same time I discovered Bearblog and I decided to jump right into it. Most influential at this moment were the blogs of eve and tiramisu, who just wrote because they wanted to, without any specific agenda. Eventually I found many other awesome blogs, but these two were honestly the reason why I decided that blogging would be a good outlet for this energy I was feeling, and also the reason why I discovered Bearblog in the first place.

All my other attempts at blogging have followed a similar vein, but in none of the others have I found a community of other bloggers that I (mostly) felt a part of. Also, in none of my other attempts was I focusing on being honest and authentic so I ended up writing people pleaser posts, or (worse) stuffy wannabe academic "philosophy". Having a focus on authenticity since starting Meadow really did help me avoid these traps in the long run, though at the beginning I was kind of lost with regards to what to write. Eventually things fell into their place once I stopped worrying about them.

What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use it?

Well, this post actually comes at a moment when I'm transitioning from having my blog on Bearblog to moving it to my own custom site.

I loved (and still love) Bearblog. It's an excellent platform and the minimalism of it really helps when you have no idea what to do with your blog, as mostly the only thing you can do is write. The community that has formed around the platform is really nice, welcoming, and all around wholesome (though perhaps this can be said of most of the IndieWeb as well).

I ended up moving over to my own site because I wanted to do other things with my blog that (by design) weren't really possible on Bearblog. Foremost among them were having separate categories for my posts (each with their own RSS; still WIP), and a nice photo log (see it here). But there were also many other small things I wanted to do, like an automatic blog front page with my latest posts and a nice archive page (though both of these are technically possible in Bear as well). I talk more about my switch, and my reason for it, in this other post.

Right now, I use Astro as my static site generator (you can see my site's code here). The site itself is hosted on GitHub Pages.

For writing I do everything in Obsidian. I mostly write from my laptop but have the notes synched to my phone with Syncthing (though I'm seriously considering paying for Obsidian Sync as a way to support the product). Every night at around 3am I have a cron job that runs on my Android phone and uploads the whole Obsidian folder to a git repo. My site reads from this git repo when building itself (which happens automatically every morning), and so everything is connected.

To actually manage my posts in Obsidian. I use a very handy plugin called obsidian-kanban which allows me to create a board with columns for the different states my posts can have. The nice thing is that the cards themselves link directly to the Obsidian files so it's all very nice to manage. This is the current status of my "Writing Board":

Previously, I was using folders to manage the different states, but I like the board approach better as I can see everything in a single flat interface (no need to go digging around folders) and I can also order the items inside each column so I can prioritize which post is more close do being ready, or which idea is more exciting. I now have only two folders "Writing" and "Published". Once I publish a post I move it to the "Published" folder and then the code that builds my site picks up the posts from said folder.

I also keep a "Journal" folder where I write every day. These notes never make their way to the blog proper, but they're tightly integrated with my blogging process. On a given day I can talk about many posts, and then I can see everything I said about a post in the "backlinks" (I love Obsidian) of that post. This makes it so that I don't need to stress about where I keep ideas! I can just keep them in the day where they happened and reference the post in question.

For example, here's what I see when I look at the backlinks of this current post you're reading (some of them hidden for privacy):

If you want to know more about how everything works then let me know! I feel there're already too many "hey look at my cool blogging flow" posts so I haven't done one. But if there's interest then I might do it.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Absolutely. I think I created my first blog when I was around 13 or so, on Blogger. I wrote on that one quite a bit, but eventually I fell into the trap of numbers and ended up feeling like a failure and abandoning everything. I've tried multiple times to find this blog again, but haven't been able to do so. Too bad, since I would love to read what my pre-teen self was thinking about! As you can see, I started blogging a long time ago (~15 years), but haven't really blogged that much as there were big gaps in between.

I think that's the only other blog of note, but I have started many other blogs where I never wrote, or only wrote a couple of posts. I started another one on Blogger, and then one on Wordpress with my brother (on which we did write a bit, though it was mostly him). I also wrote a couple of posts on Medium but I really disliked that they asked everyone to "sign in to continue" reading, so I quickly closed that one.

For a while I also had a personal blog (with my real name) made with another static site generator called Gatsby. It was nice, but I pretty much spent ALL my time working on the site itself rather than making content for it. Many fall into this trap where they use a custom site before they're mature enough writers to actually use it. I think I wrote one developer post about some library or other, but didn't like it that much and desisted. I also found that using my real name was a turn off for me.

For Meadow I actually started it on Substack (🤢) and it began as a semi-philosophic blog. I wrote like 5 posts or so until I decided I didn't like the current direction I was taking, nor the Substack platform and how they were constantly pushing me to "get more views". I then moved it shortly to Tumblr before finding my home in Bear. Tumblr is fun. It has very nice customization capabilities and the app is quite decent. The main reason why I didn't stay on Tumblr was because I just didn't understand the platform. The stream of posts felt very messy, and the ads were just too much. However, I liked the app so much (the schedule feature is excellent!) that I still have and use an account were I dump all the funny memes I find. I don't use it except as a dumping ground though.

For a very short while I experimented with writing posts on Bluesky (long form content in short form format). I thought it was a neat idea but in the end it didn't really go that well (example). I decided I was just kidding myself and recognized my fear and aversion to writing on a real blog. Bluesky felt more informal so it removed quite a bit of my fear of failure. In the end this helped me change how I view myself in relation to my own blog, and made me realize I was just taking myself (and my blog) waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too seriously.

How do you write your posts?

I mostly write in the mornings. I usually wake up around 5:30am, go to the kitchen and make myself a coffee, then write until the kids wake up around 6:40am or so. For a long while I wrote everything in the evening just before bed, after the kids fell asleep. But then I discovered morning pages and decided to try to do them properly, first thing in the morning. I was surprised to discover I had a lot more energy in my writing, and things would in general flow better. In my mornings I now do a mix of morning pages and blogging, or sometimes I end up writing a blog post in my morning pages. I've found that the less I stress about this the better it turns out.

I very rarely sit down with a specific idea about what I want to write. It does happen, but mostly I just start writing stream of consciousness and then eventually something will pop up that ends up being a blog post. I try to see my blogging as similar to growing a plant: I create the conditions for it to happen and then it just happens all by itself. With a plant, you take care of weeds and water it and make sure it's in a nice sunny spot, but you don't really have any control on its actual growing. Writing is similar: you create the time and the space, clear your head of distractions, water it with coffee, and it happens.

I alternate between writing on my PC and writing by hand. Right now I'm in a phase where I prefer to write on my laptop. But a couple of months ago I was writing everything by hand (even my blog posts!) and then transferring it to digital format with my Longhand tool. Here's a pic from some months ago. I like to have a big cup of coffee when I write ☕️

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

Ahh good question. I can tell you which ones I don't like that much, but saying which are my favorites is harder. Let's see...

I have a soft spot for stories, as that is something I've been trying to do more of since I first started this blog (though it hasn't really happened yet). I'm fond of all the stories I've published here.

Of my other posts, perhaps some that I personally like are:

Any future plans for the blog?

Continue writing! That's foremost among my plans. Continue being authentic.

Perhaps the kind of content I'll post here will change as the things that I'm interested in evolve. That's another key goal I have for the blog: not to let it keep me from growing as a person. It's easy to fall into this trap I think, where one is so identified with one's own image (especially if that image is conditioned on an external thing like a blog) that we're resistant to growth and change. I feel that, for me, my blog can either be an anchor that holds me down, or wings that help me soar.

I've been thinking of starting to experiment with writing in a more constrained way. Maybe sit down and pick an idea out of my list of ideas and train myself to write about it no matter what. I think it's a great skill to have and one that I haven't really developed. I'm also interested in experimenting with outlining my posts before writing rather than just "discovering" what it's all about as I write it. It's true that most (all?) of my posts are explorative/reflective in nature so this might not work, but I can't know for sure until I try!

For my site, I want to add a "now" page (which seems to be all the rage these days), though I haven't gotten around to it yet. Also, I need to clean up my photolog page. Right now when you click on an image it just takes you to the Bluesky post for that image, but I want it to instead open up it up in a pop up, and maybe show the original text posted with the image. I've also been toying with the idea of adding comments to posts (through Bluesky or Mastodon or both), but I'm not sure if this will actually be a smart move. Maybe add a link to the thread? That could be it... Though at the same time I like my blog being entirely separate from social media.

Who will participate next?

I'm nominating Lars-Christian!

Edit: here's the link to Lars' answer :)

Thanks for reading!

~ 🌿

When our feelings & emotions go against what we think is best

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 13:13:12 GMT

For the past month or so, I've been trying to craft (for it is an act of craftsmanship) a morning routine for myself. In an ideal world, it would look something like this:

wake up around 5:20am (kids usually wake up around 7am so this gives me ~1:30 hours),
get up and to some yoga¹,
go upstairs and make myself a coffee,
drink coffee and write until kids get up.
- it could either be journaling or blogging, or both, depending on how I feel

Of course, I almost never ever seem to be able to hit all of these. The one I struggle with the most is getting up and working out (either yoga or something else). I tend to stay in bed, procrastinating until it’s too late. Then, I get up to make coffee and write (which is easy because both of these are things I enjoy doing). The funny thing is that when I do manage to convince myself to work out, I always feel great afterward. The workout session itself is always light and enjoyable.

For the past week or so I've been reflecting on how curious it is that we're so strongly puppeteered by our emotions and feelings. When we want to do something we opt for trying to trick our emotions into aligning with what we want rather than using our willpower to assert control over ourselves.

I think we've all said to ourselves at one point or another something like "oh I'll do this thing I don't want to do and then I'll treat myself to some chocolate". It's a common mechanism we use to trick us into doing the things we want to do, by making these gatekeepers of things we do want.

Why is it so hard to put our foot down and do what we've decide we want / should do, rather than just following our internal state? We tend to think we have power over our minds but in reality it's our mind-body that has power over us—over what we do, how we feel, and how we treat others. We're all like house cats, letting our nature manipulate us and end up "fighting over a can of food when there's an identical can next to it". I know this all too well because, much of the time, I’m the first to fall into this trap, skimping on the things I should do just because I don’t feel like it.

We should treat our emotions the way Theoden (Saruman) treats Gandalf.

hehe...

though perhaps this is not the best example as Theoden (Saruman) is defeated by Gandalf, which stands for our emotions in this metaphor. Anyway... No metaphor is perfect.

I've been following a YouTube channel called Yoga With Adriene which has a lot of great, beginner friendly yoga workouts. What I enjoy the most is that she has a bunch of 30-day yoga playlists so I don't really need to think much about what I want to do on a given day. Just do one playlist at a time. I'm grateful for her taking the time to making these, and making it as easy as possible to jump in. ↩

Tentative steps back into blogging

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 16:30:51 GMT

So yeah, hi. Hello. Ahem... Good to see you again! It's been a while, and I hope things have been going well for you.

Not so long ago, my second son was born, and I stopped writing here. I kept journaling most days, whenever I managed to convince myself to get out of bed early enough, but I didn't feel like I had the time or mental energy to consistently write blog posts, keep up with what my favorite bloggers were saying, or even answer emails!

But things have cooled down a bit now. My new son is almost four months old, and he's very cute 🤗 He's also starting to require less energy from us and is transitioning from being an energy sink into a wellspring of smiles and laughter.

I feel like I'm back in a state where things are somewhat stable, and I have the energy and space to get up earlier than everyone else and blog a bit. Who knows? I might even find the will to exercise during some of these mornings. We'll see.

I'm not sure what my blog will be about going forward. It might not change that much from what it was before, or maybe it will. I felt like it was hard for me to write since my previous self-image was so solidified that I found it hard to move on to other things or (as is the case now) start writing again. This is the reason I'm writing this whole post—to break the ice, as they say.

Is it weird that this resistance I feel towards blogging again feels a bit like social anxiety? One would think it doesn’t matter, as, firstly, you really don’t know who I am, and second, it’s my site/space, and I can do whatever I want. I guess this is one of the reasons I felt that writing on my blog constantly was so good for me. If things were to cool down, then it would all become awkward, as it has.

Maybe a quick catch-up is in order now. What’s new in my life since my last post? Well, my new son is at the top of that list, along with learning to know him and watching, open-mouthed, as my oldest turns out to be the best big brother in the world. I’ve also been reading a lot of Ram Dass, and wondering about my faith (or total lack thereof) and what it means to be spiritually fulfilled. I’ve been thinking about the things we give up when our minds are obsessed with scientific rigor. I’ve also managed to pull myself away from compulsively playing games on my phone and realized that the reason for this was that I didn’t feel very good internally and was looking for external pleasure and distraction. I’ve also (quite recently) started experimenting with microdosing THC every now and then as an experiment, and it has worked quite well, though not how I expected (I might write a post about this).

I’ve wanted to get back into blogging for a while now, but I struggled to take the final step. The final push came some days ago in the form of an email asking about my Guestbooks project. In that email, the sender mentioned micro.blog, which led me down a multi-day rabbit hole exploring the platform and its implications. I created a site on micro.blog and was planning to move my blog over there, but in the end, I decided to create a custom site and host it myself (more on this later). Still, I would recommend the platform to anyone! It is very neat and has a lot of features, but my favorite thing is the ideas the creator of the platform has about online interactions and what a healthy social media site would look like¹. Too bad I’m not a social media user, or I would definitely love to use the 'social' aspects of micro.blog that they’re developing. Still, I might continue to support them monetarily just because it’s such a cool and wholesome project.

So, about my site...

I used to be a longtime user of Bear. I really like Bear, and the community that has formed around it is one of the best, most loving, understanding, compassionate, and beautiful I’ve ever seen on the internet. I attribute this in no small part to the efforts that Herman (the creator) has made to set the tone, and tirelessly ensure the platform is free from spam sites. I’m extremely grateful for these platforms, as they’ve provided a fertile ground on which both old and new blogs can grow and flourish.

I had absolutely no reason for switching, except for the fact that I was bumping against Bear’s minimalism. I had things I wanted to do but couldn’t. It’s the nature of such a platform that it can only allow you to change so many things. And that’s a good thing! Especially for the kind of user who doesn’t want to deal with technical stuff or just wants a place to write and not think about it that much.

I know I don’t talk much about it, but I love programming. Code runs in my veins and beats in my heart. I had so many ideas over time for things I wanted to add to my blog but couldn’t. For me, the site itself is as much an expression of art as whatever I write in my posts. And so, I’ve decided to migrate away from Bear and create my own custom web page.

Around a year ago, I started toying with Astro and absolutely fell in love with it. I just personally find it so clean, intuitive, and easy to use! It took me very little time to reimplement my Bear blog in Astro, and have it look pretty much exactly the same², with some extras. I imagine that as time goes on, I will start to deviate more and more. I’ll let it flow as it will.

Another reason I’ve hesitated so much in migrating to my own site is that it would mean the loss of Bear’s discover page, which I found to be an excellent way to improve the discoverability of your blog. Yeah, I know—I’m a sucker for numbers, and I shouldn’t worry so much about them. I try not to, and my move away from Bear is also, in part, an attempt to separate myself from this aspect. Though I have to admit, I’ve been weak, and for now, I’ve added privacy-respecting analytics³ to my site.

So... yeah... I think my blog is now evolving into my site (which contains a blog).

See you around ~ 🍀

If you're interested in these, you can look him up on your favorite search engine. Also, I would recommend you check out his book about Indie Microblogging. I haven’t read all of it yet, but I’m finding the first few sections really interesting and on point. ↩
If you would like to do something similar, I would be happy to help—just reach out. I’m thinking maybe I can set up some sort of Astro template that looks and feels just like Bear, though I haven’t really searched to see if there’s one already. ↩
Or better said, I will add analytics to my site. I’m still evaluating whether I want to use tinylytics (nicer, made by a well-known indie web creator) or umami (less nice, but has a much more generous free plan and is open source). ↩

RE: Write like you talk

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 22:10:00 GMT

Earlier today I was reading some new posts by Visa. There’s not much to say about that, except that he uses pretty normal words and writes very well.

This might seem like an odd comment, but it stems from my reading of another post, A Brief Case on Bearblog. The author of that post is clearly a talented and experienced writer who, it must be said, writes very (very) well. However, the words they use are so fancy, and the way they’re woven is so perfect that reading them feels ?strange?¹.

This thought reminded me of an excellent essay by Paul Graham, Write Like You Talk. In it, he argues that if you want people to connect with you, you must write in a way that feels familiar to them. Essentially, the essay rests on the assumption that we all speak similarly but think differently.

I’m the first to acknowledge that language can be beautifully woven and that there’s a definite art to it. However, I agree with Paul Graham’s observation that, when writing to connect, we should use common language, words, and structures. Doing otherwise will only make it harder for your readers to connect with you, as well as for you to connect with your readers. You end up crafting something that’s not really you, creating a barrier between yourself and your audience.

Don’t get me wrong. High-language is definitely appropriate in situations where it’s needed, such as when describing something difficult to express. But unless it flows effortlessly from your soul, crafting something just to sound fancy can make it sound artificial.

I think that, as a society, we’ve come to overvalue colorful stuff, which in turn pushes creators to feel inadequate when their work isn’t vibrant. As readers (and consumers in general), we tend to gravitate toward the colorful, perhaps perceiving it as higher quality or simply more appetizing.

Write like you talk has a deeper meaning than it might initially seem. It not only suggests that we should use common language in an easy-to-understand way, but also that our writing should flow naturally—it should be us on the page, not a mask of ourselves.

I’m reminded of the poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot. Here’s a specific section I’m thinking about:

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

So, don’t let what you write become just a face you use when meeting other faces. Don't make it yet another mask.

I realized after publishing this that it sounds like I don't enjoy their posts, but that's not the case at all. I love reading Emma's posts! What I meant to say here is that they write differently from me and it sometimes feels like we're speaking different dialects. ↩

On waking up to write every morning

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 15:33:00 GMT

Today, I want to write about why I do this—why I wake up early and take the trouble to get up, go upstairs, and make some coffee. I’ve been wondering about this these past few days. Why make myself go through it? Why not just stay in bed and sleep an extra hour? Such a nice, soft, warm bed.

Every day I tell myself the same thing: “You’ll feel much better if you do!” And it’s true! I don’t know of any tonic that’s as good for my mood, energy, and mental health as a solid hour of writing in the morning before life starts. It feels like a luxury, really, having the time to do this, and I’m grateful. It’s just me, the sunrise, my dog sitting next to me, and the sound of the pen as it scratches meaning on paper, echoing in the silent dining room.

I’ve been writing this way for a bit over a year now. Mostly, I write in my journal, and lately (literally these past week or so) I’ve started writing for my blog. I’ve come to appreciate that the less I try, the more beneficial my writing time is. I never think about what I’ll write today—unless I have something specific I want to personally talk about or work through. Right now, I find that the best attitude is to think that I’m responsible for bringing myself to the table, and then it’s up to my pen and my hand to actually put things down. It certainly feels like that sometimes, as if I’m just here reading the words as they’re scratched on the paper, watching the ink dry, while another part of me puts down what it wants to say.

Whenever I do try too hard, things end up feeling forced. The other part of me—that mysterious wellspring—wants to take my pen down different paths. Whenever I let it, just observe, is when I end up feeling more rested and energetic at the end.

Sometimes I know what I’m going to talk about before I start (like today), and other times I start with an idea and end up talking about something completely different (like the post about the origins of fear from some days ago). Thankfully, I’m no professional writer; no one is paying me to write about one specific topic, so I have the freedom to let myself “relax” into it and let my subconscious wander where it will, savoring different pastures.

I’ve found that my ramblings always have some reason. I guess it’s more or less like dreaming (if you subscribe to Jung’s ideas about dreams), where everything in your dream is a symbol trying to tell you something. I feel it’s similar with writing this way, albeit to a lesser extent. Sometimes I’m even surprised by the choice of words—using words I normally wouldn’t use—and I’ve learned to recognize parts that come out in colorful language (or semi-poetry) as my mind telling me that part is specifically important for me right now, especially charged with meaning and emotion that needs to resort to metaphors and poetry to capture it.

I feel like my role here is more like that of the sculptor than the composer (though maybe composers are also sculptors?). My job is to bring out, to discover the story, not to shape it. As soon as I start to judge, I start to control, and end up warping the thing into an unnatural shape, one that’s not its own. When you create, don’t judge, don’t control, but discover. Whatever you find is perfect; it’s what it was meant to be when it called upon you to find it.

So, why do I do this? Because I love it.

🌳

What to do with a draft once you outgrow it

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 16:19:00 GMT

Yesterday before falling asleep I was thinking about my current drafts. Lately I've been hesitating with regards to what to publish; I have many drafts that I'm no longer excited about but I still feel like I should publish before moving on to more exciting stuff.

I have this idea, this notion, of what my blog's narrative is and I'm trying to continue that narrative in a consistent way. But yesterday I realized that maybe I no longer want to continue that narrative!

I've been thinking about this issue for a while now. The idea that, as bloggers, we grow and change and how I'm no longer the person I was one month ago, and even less the one I was 4 months ago. My resolution was that it's ok to feel this way and it's fine that what I want to write about now no longer matches the style or content of the things I wrote in the past. One should allow oneself to evolve, and accept one's own blog as a reflection of this change.

But this is only about going forward, about things I haven't written yet. What I failed to consider was the gray area, the half-written posts waiting to be reviewed, those almost finished drafts that my past self deemed good enough and was intending to publish in the near future but never got around to it. Right now I have 23 drafts which are basically all almost-finished posts and only need some minor revision.

The way in which I write is that I sit down every day and just write about something, whatever is on my mind. Occasionally there's a part of what I put down that I feel is good and that I could post on my blog, so I copy the text and make a new file in my "drafts" folder. Every once in a while I go back to this folder and choose a draft that calls to me, clean it up, and publish it. When choosing what to publish I try to preserve some sort of internal consistency with respect to my existing blog posts so that I don't put out something that references a detail I mentioned in a yet unpublished draft.

This method has worked fine for now, but the speed at which I add new drafts is faster than the one at which I publish them (writing is of course more fun than editing) so I'm now at the point where I hardly remember what I was thinking (let alone feeling) when I wrote the older drafts. Moreover, I no longer feel like I want to publish all of those older ones since I've changed and so have my interests.

I tell myself I should still publish these drafts in order since they tell a coherent story and I want to paint as complete a picture as possible. But I feel this has been keeping me back from really enjoying the act of publishing, and (more importantly) from growing and branching out into other stuff. I now see tackling most of these drafts as a chore, one which I frequently procrastinate on.

I said that these are almost finished posts, but they still require quite a bit of work to clean up, reorder text, cut out stuff, add new stuff, etc, and I don't find myself really enjoying this part that much unless I'm excited about the post I'm in the process of cleaning up.

So, I've decided I will do a "spring cleaning" of my drafts folder. I will apply the Marie Kondo method of cleaning up and just archive all drafts that "don't spark a sense or joy" or some other emotion. I don't believe in deleting stuff though, so who knows, maybe these archived drafts will eventually find their way to my blog at some point.

I think that, going forward, I should strive to publish possibly on the same day or week in which I write something¹. Honestly, this drafts folder has been weighing on my mind as clutter and I'm glad (even happy) that I've accepted I don't need to deal with it.

... 🍵 ...

Soon after I started my blog, Eve sent me a really nice email and in it she mentioned an advice I sadly tend to forget², but I try to frequently come back to it.

Sometimes I have to sit down and remind myself that there are no rules for what I post & I can change the game at any time!

I tend to solidify around these imaginary rules and suffer for it. It's good to remind oneself that your blog is your space and you can really do whatever you want with it, there're no rules.

~ 🍃

That is, after I deal with the drafts I do intend to publish! I'll switch my writing schedule so I work on those as a priority so I can get them out of the way. ↩
I frequently discover/accept an insight only to forget about it, and then rediscover it again down the road. I'm planning on making a post about this soon. ↩

Follow widely to write widely

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 02:25:00 GMT

I've recently been thinking about the concept of following many blogs. I was worried that if I allowed myself to follow lots of people then I would eventually end up swamped by posts I wouldn't have time to read nor the heart to skip. Brandon recently answered my own post with a good point and inspired me to allow myself to explore more.

I spent a couple of days just digging through the blogosphere, and as always was amazed by the diversity I found. I also realized some important things:

What I write is strongly influenced by what I read. Not only in content but also in style.
There's no real guideline in how to create posts. There's no expectations you need to fulfill, no boxes you need to check. There's nothing you need to do besides doing whatever you want.
I tend to solidify the way I write. In other words, I tend to think there is a correct and incorrect way for me to write posts. This is a direct contradiction of the point above, and is ultimately a harmful illusion because it keeps me from exploring different styles and topics!

I think all of these (except for point 1, which is just my personality) stem from the fact that I'm currently reading too few things, most of which share a certain common topology. There are other people out there, writing wonderful things in exciting new ways, and I just don't know about them.

Up until now I've been reading almost exclusively people that have their blog on Bearblog. They're all awesome and interesting in their own right, but if we think about it in terms of statistics then we could say my distribution is strongly skewed towards the sort of people that have a Bearblog in the first place.

I think a good place to find new people to follow is by checking out the blogrolls of the people I currently like, and pick some from there. Sure, it's not a perfectly random sample but I think it should be good enough to start with.

...

I feel bad saying the word follow. It almost sounds like I'm building some sort of number-objective-social-media-crap. It also has the implication of going behind, trailing behind, which I've always found unsatisfactory. I think a better term would be to keep up with someone you respect. But I can't think of a way to say this that sounds good.

After all, that's what you do when you've been reading someone's posts for a while. You get to know them, and you respect them as individuals. I keep coming back to the blogs I like to keep up with because I've found I appreciate and respect the authors, and like to know their opinions on stuff.

Even if sometimes I don't agree with said opinions I always find them useful because they help me find out what my own opinions are, or introduce me to new ideas or ways of looking at things that I hadn't considered before.

...

Since I started this blog I've spent a considerable amount of time thinking about how to be more authentic. I've usually held to the idea that the least blogs I read, the easier it would be since I'll have less external influence. But now I realize this is wrong. The only way to know who you really are is by, paradoxically, reading a lot, reading so much that the gradations in what you like and dislike help you find yourself.

On following many blogs

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 02:15:00 GMT

Something I've been thinking for a while now in the back of my mind is how am I to keep up with all the new blogs that are popping up in my radar. There's also the question of whether this is something I should do or not.

I think I've had a lot of luck in finding a small set of blogs I enjoy. I now have a nice blogroll, and I have around 1 new post a day to read, sometimes less, sometimes more (usually less though). I think this is a nice amount. I imagine in the future I might subscribe to a couple of new ones but not that many (maybe 5?, less than 10), which raises the question of "how many is too many?" and more importantly "what to do when I've reached the 'too many' point?".

I can't think of any of the blogs I follow that I would like to replace with another. After spending some time reading someone's random thoughts you kind of start to appreciate that person! On one hand I'm interested in knowing what's going on in their life, and on the other I feel like I'm somehow supporting them by reading what they write, cheering for them from my own shadowy corner. It's like being friends, but information flows in a single direction. I feel that I would lose this feeling of closeness if I start following many people at once. If allowed to go to the extreme I would probably find myself with a maddening cacophony of noise which would make me stop reading them OR stop appreciating each individual individually. I dread the idea of finding myself with a wordier Twitter.

I've read that some people do follow hundreds of different blogs without any issues, and have the presence of mind to link to many of those posts in their own writing (which gives me the impression that they pay close attention to them). I'm sure these people enjoy following many blogs and publishing answers to other's posts, but I don't think I would like to make my blog mainly about conversing with others. Connecting is wonderful, but I want to leave space for personal exploration. Though maybe I'm just saying this because I tend to lean towards the introverted side of things.

Anyway, there's no real conclusion to any of this. I think the best thing to do here (as in many other areas of life) is to just let the thing flow naturally, and see what happens. I might even surprise myself ending up following lots of different people and not suffering about it!

Meadow - Posts tagged with blogging

A fortress called Blog

Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around

Introducing Mochi — and thoughts on analytics and webmentions

Notes on technical details

Blog Question Challenge 2025

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use it?

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

How do you write your posts?

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

Any future plans for the blog?

Who will participate next?

When our feelings & emotions go against what we think is best

Footnotes

Tentative steps back into blogging

Footnotes

RE: Write like you talk

Footnotes

On waking up to write every morning

What to do with a draft once you outgrow it

Footnotes

Follow widely to write widely

On following many blogs