Writing

I want to write better. And the best way to do that, is to write more. Thinking about which, immediately kills the urge to write, because I take really long to write anything. And the actual writing, is very arduous to me. So what to do? I guess I need to just lower the bar. Do less. More consistently. And then serendipitiously, as they say, when the student is ready, the master appears. David Kadavy’s conducting a 100 Word Writing Habit Online Course, this month. He seemed to be in the same rut as I am now. ...

This was a thread on my fediverse account, that grew too long. Posting it here, all together, the way my thoughts spilled out. All I knew about Mandy Brown when I began following her a year ago is she has a doggie called Furiosa she thinks about books the way I do she reads books and then writes about reading them, the way I always dreamed I could she’s a prominent member of my circle of the Eminent Dead Today, as she celebrates the quinceanera of her blog, I realised that she also: ...

I did a lot of research the other day about what I’d need to build a contact form for my website. I bookmarked lots of pages. And today, I come and look at this mountain of videos and sites and pages and woneder what exactly it is, that I am supposed to tackle. Nothing makes sense. I know I ruled out Sendy as an option. Or did I? Do I need Javascript? How much? Can I get snippets to copy paste? Do I need to go learn Javascript? What is spam protection? Do I need spam protection? How do I do it? I’ll have to go look at it all again now.1 ...

I wrote the other day, about switching to Noah Webster’s dictionary everywhere, I possibly could. Now I did that after reading this lovely James Somers post. And that post seems to be resounding through the web, with folks integrating it into their workflows in different ways. So I was really happy when I read Jon Snader’s post telling me I could have my beloved Webster’s dictionary in Emacs! This sounded too good to be true! I didn’t believe it! Because why would I believe some old, wise wizard who’s only been writing about Emacs on a near daily basis for close to fourteen years?! I had to try this out myself! So I whip out ye, old, trusty scratch buffer, type crap into it and select it.1 And then I fire up M-x dictionary-search, like Snader tells me to This is the moment of poop … err truth! I hit return and … How now brown cow?! It actually works! ...

This James Somers post, made me realise why my dictionary word lookups were so much less engaging than when I was a kid. From the post … […] go look up “flash” in Webster’s (the edition I’m using is the 1913). The first thing you’ll notice is that the example sentences don’t sound like they came out of a DMV training manual (“the lights started flashing”) — they come from Milton and Shakespeare and Tennyson (“A thought flashed through me, which I clothed in act”) ...

I steal quite a bit from other folk, to put on my blog.1 Case in point, is my last post where I stole the image from Tom Gauld. Or a few Seth Godin posts, somewhere on the blog, that I have posted in their entirety. While I do credit them in the post, I wished there was a way, I could programmatically tell the search engines and the bots of the world that I did in fact, steal from someplace and that they should actually be looking over there and leading people there. A little bit of searching, reavealed that there is in fact, such a way to do it. It’s called the Canonical URL. In a nutshell, it tells the machines to guide folk there, because that is the source of truth. ...