It was a beautiful day for disc golf, and then 10 minutes later… it wasn’t 😅
I love weekend days when I can stroll around town, ducking in and out of local shops with the family.
Just stumbled on https://aboutideasnow.com/ on Mastodon. This seems like a great resource for finding good personal sites to follow and people to connect with!
Blogroll
I added a blogroll to my site! I had been thinking about creating this for a while, and the new recommendations feature in Micro.blog gave me the push to finally do it. I added it to my navigation links, but… it’s getting really crowded up there. I may have to do something about that, but I want people to be able to find my blogroll, and putting a link in any of my other pages didn’t seem quite right.
For now, it is just a list of sites, but I’d like to add little one-liner descriptions of why I like each site. I’ve had a lot of fun discovering blogs through the blogrolls of others, and I’m excited to start to share my own recommendations! My list will grow as I discover new blogs. Right now I’ve been finding a lot of interesting blogs by clicking around at https://blogroll.org/ and https://ooh.directory/. These are awesome resources to find independent folks sharing from their own space on the web.
My favorite way to discover sites though is through personal recommendations. The more organic, the better. Here’s my rank order of favorite ways:
- A personal 1:1 recommendation - “Jake! You gotta check out….”
- A link in a post I’m enjoying (falling down a rabbit hole)
- A blogroll on a personal site
- A blog listing site (like those linked above)
If you have some blogs I need to check out or other ways of discovering blogs, I’d love to hear about them!
It’s a tough job being the human garbage disposal that cleans up after family meals, but someone has to do it.
Filling out a local tax refund form this morning, dreaded but necessary 🙄. I only worked in the office 16% of the time last year. I actually spent more time not working at all, since I was able to use parental leave. I’m feeling thankful for NASA’s parental leave policy!
Remember To Live, An Interactive Haiku
days lived
more to go
remember to live!
Input your own numbers into the haiku above as a reminder to yourself to live!
For the first box, calculate your_age_in_years * 365
For the second box, calculate your_expected_max_age_in_years * 365 - first_box_value
calculator-1.com
Originally I had hoped to make this much more dynamic so that you could input your current age and expected max age and I would handle all the calculating behind the scenes, but alas Javascript doth not jive with Markdown.
My wife and I finally put pins in our world map! I’m grateful for the travel opportunities we’ve had, but there’s a lot more yet to be explored! 📍🗺️
vast expanse, stars born,
galaxies like sand, and us
pale blue perfection
Haiku
I’m adding a new category on my site for haiku. Most of these will be quick micro-posts, but others may be longer. I have an idea for an interactive haiku but I’m not positive how that will work since my posts are published in Markdown. It should be a fun mini-project!
To my chagrin, I tend towards rule-following, so most of my haiku will follow the 5-7-5 format. I would like to experiment outside of those lines from time to time.
Here are some haiku I’ve been workshopping in my pocket journal:
whatever you do
must matter so you enjoy
whatever you do
I will be faithful
all of my days are for you
no one else will do
flowers dance in wind
clouds amble along slowly
people collect likes
quite peculiar
is the love of a small child
pure, strong, undeserved
oh you fool! live more!
think often of your deathbed
it is near, not far
look how far I ran
so far to be same old me
right where I began
Been feeling resistance to posting on here. So this is me doing something small (“literally anything”) to get moving again Do literally anything
Coffee and journals were made for each other. ☕ 🖋️
Spotted this during date night. A good omen?
“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
- Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek
This is a big reason that I’ve been off of social media. The main thing I miss is keeping up with life updates from friends and family. Someone should build an AI that watches my social feeds and sends me a summarized weekly email of my friends' and family’s updates.
I added a new option for subscribing to new posts on my Subscribe page. Now you can choose between subscribing only to long-form Articles or subscribing to all posts.
This one gave me chills at the end. A wonderful piece by Henrik Karlsson. The third chair
Tear It All Down
My website looked quite different at its beginning. I thought starting a blog would be a good opportunity to play around with new technology, so I decided to teach myself SvelteKit and build my site with it. It was very exciting: I would build in SvelteKit, write all my posts as standalone markdown files, and deploy on Vercel. As I started building and exploring what other people had done to get inspiration, I came across a concept called the IndieWeb. I felt aligned with the values of this web community, so I wanted to build my site to be part of it. Suddenly, my to-do list was expanding rapidly to include all sorts of IndieWeb specs and principles. Would markdown files be enough to do everything I wanted to do? Perhaps I would need to set up a database using something like Supabase…
The more I added to my to-do list for the site, the more I began to dread working on it. This was supposed to be fun, what happened?
I lost my Why. What I really wanted was to start writing. To have a place to share myself and to figure out how to do that. That was my Why. But I wasn’t clear on that. I thought this site would be a good place to write and be a fun coding project. Mixing those was a mistake for me. I became so consumed with perfecting the design and functionality that I had no time to think about writing.
So what to do? I had this thing that I built, that I actually quite liked, but it was taking me further from my Why rather than toward it.
I decided to tear it all down.
I threw everything away and started from a blank slate. How could I just write? How could I stay connected to my Why? A blogging platform, duh! Other people have already solved the problem of creating a website whose primary purpose is publishing writing. In fact, Manton over at Micro.blog solved that problem and built his solution on the IndieWeb principles I admire, so that was the clear choice for me. I took everything I had written and migrated it over to Micro.blog, abandoning my SvelteKit project.
After the migration, everything felt better. I had space to write, space to bring forth my Why. I still couldn’t keep myself from customizing themes and plugins to make the site my own, but a little bit of play is okay as long as it leaves my Why undisturbed.
Why had this not been obvious in the beginning? Well for one, I didn’t even know about Micro.blog or the IndieWeb when I started out. But more importantly, my thinking had been clouded by an unclear Why and a fear of judgment, which I’ve come to realize are connected. My fear was something like, “This is supposed to be a web software guy and he didn’t build his own site from scratch? He must not really know his stuff.”
That’s a silly fear. Who cares? Have you seen all the intelligent people working in the web space that host their sites on a platform? They’re everywhere! And yet, I could not come to that realization until I was really clear on my Why.
I share all of this to implore you to evaluate your Why. Do you have the right Why? Are you clear on it? Is what you’re doing moving you in the right direction? If not, it’s very possible that you can make minor course corrections to get you back on track. You should try that first. But if you’ve gotten far away from your Why, don’t be afraid to tear it all down. It’s okay to start at zero. The sunk cost has already sunk, so don’t drown yourself trying to save it.
Tearing it all down is not the fastest way to do a thing, but it may be the way to do the right thing.
Here are some screenshots of what the site looked like before. I had a v1 for my homepage, which was ripped off from this YouTube video: Build & Deploy a Modern Web Portfolio w. SvelteKit & TailwindCSS (youtube.com). That felt fake and not like my own, so I started to simplify it into a v2 before deciding to tear it all down.
v1 homepage
v2 homepage
Articles page
Articles page - light mode
Article page
Connect page
Tags/Categories Page
I’ve had a Now page for a bit now, but just had my site added to nownownow.com. Pretty neat that Derek curates this all himself. He seems like a kind and down-to-earth guy over email, which tracks with what I picked up from his site.
I’m getting excited for this moon landing! Coverage has started: www.space.com/intuitive…
A Piece of My Self
A blog post is not just a piece of writing to me. It is a piece of my self, and these pieces track the process of my becoming. Sometimes I forget and I get lost, so these pieces and connections help to bring me back to who I am and who I aspired to be.
- Winnie Lim, in P&B: Winnie Lim
I appreciate this reframing of a blog post as a “piece of my self”. As I set out in the early stages of my blog, this captures quite well what I aspire for it to be. Each post is one tiny piece of me, a snapshot in time of one aspect of my self I thought worth sharing. Brought together as a whole, they tell a scattered story of my wanderings.
Some posts will be technical, some funny, some vulnerable, and some excited, because these are all pieces of my self. I look forward to looking back on years-old posts, and reminiscing where I was on my path at a given time. I already enjoy doing this with personal journal entries, but I have a sense that there will be a unique quality to reflecting on the progression of my blog.
I am also eager for serendipitous moments when someone encounters one of these pieces of my self, and is so compelled by it that they take time to discuss it with me. Positive or negative, if someone is engaging with one of these pieces of my self then it must have struck a chord, and I think that is a decent signal that I am approximating Truth, which is one of my ultimate aims of this blog. To be truth-seeking in my self and truth-seeking in my interests.
I already felt this a bit with my recent post on My Obsidian Daily Note Template. I was astounded by how quickly people were adopting parts of it or all of it. As I published it I thought, “Is this too ‘in the weeds’? Did I waste my time going into all this detail?”. But there were people out there, quite a few, looking for someone to guide them through these particular weeds. It is a wonderful feeling to create a point of connection. Something you and another can both behold and say, “This resonates”.
So this, too, is one piece among others. If it resonates, I would love to hear from you.