One of my aims for this year is to try and develop some more healthy foundations or habits in my life. For many years now I’ve wanted to blog more regularly like I did in the very early days of discovering what the small web could be. It was a place of individuals sharing their lives and thoughts on their own websites. Comments were on, people linked to each other, and a feeling of community developed.

In the years since my blog has been through many incarnations, it’s been Wordpress powered, Jekyll powered, Micro.blog, and back to Wordpress. But one thing for certain is that posting over the last decade has dwindled to almost nothing, but with the odd renaissance here and there. The desire to blog has always been there but for one reason or another never lasted, or more accurately I was never able to form it into a habit like I used too.

Over the last year I’ve noticed a significant change in what I call the small web. I’ve found a lot more personal blogs who post regularly and, most importantly, interesting content. It’s sparked my creativity again, and so I’m taking some steps to start again.

One of the barriers that I’ve struggled with over the last years is that I’ve wanted my blog to be too complicated. I wanted to have small posts to replace twitter, links to be bookmarks, as well as a place to share my work, and write longer posts like this one. What I’ve realised is that when I enjoyed blogging in the early days (2007ish era) it was a lot simpler. To begin with I had one post type and it was a lot easier and a lot more fun. I realised that I needed to return to that level of simplicity if I was ever going to form a new habit of blogging regularly. So that’s what I’m doing.

I’ve installed a new theme that takes away the temptation to try and add new types of posts and instead places an emphasis on writing blog posts. So that’s what I intend to do with more regularity.

I’ve begun the long process of adding in some of my old posts from previous iterations of this site. My apologies if this triggers a load of posts in your RSS. I’m working backwards, and I’ve now added all the posts from 2023 and 2022. It will be a slow process as I’ve decided to add each post manually, importing from the markdown file I have saved. Initially I am just adding the more formal posts but may go back and add all the link posts I’ve made at some point.

It’s been about one month since I restarted my blog back on Wordpress. I say restarted rather than moved because so far I’ve yet to add all my old posts to the archive, something I still plan to do, but which I’ve yet to find the time for.

The change was triggered by a combination of things, but the chief ones were ease of posting and familiarity. I used Wordpress for well over a decade on this blog and a number of other websites I’ve built over the years. I’ve had dalliances with other CMS’s but ultimately the ecosystem which surrounds Wordpress has pulled me back in. The apps I like to use to write are well integrated making it easy to post from my Mac, iPad, or even iPhone if I wish and it’s helped. I may not be posting quite as often as I wanted too when I made the change, but I have posted more to my blog in the last month than I did in the last year. As far as I am concerned that’s a win, and importantly the lack of friction has fuelled my motivation and desire to post more.

Combined with this change to my blog setup I’ve been making greater use of RSS over the last few months. In fact my use of RSS was one of the things that fuelled the move back to Wordpress. I’ve found myself returning to a habit I had many years ago. I would ease into my work day with a coffee and my RSS, saving longer posts to read later, reading shorter posts, and sharing the most interesting links through my blog. It’s a nice way to begin the day before a barrage of meetings, and a good way to stay on top of any industry related news. I’ve a feeling it’s going to stick around, and hopefully that means good things for my blog as well.

A few months ago I came across a blog that has been a mainstay in my RSS feeds ever since. I enjoy each and every post for the simple reason that it is the only place to find them and the thoughts of the author.

He is introducing a new series called People and Blogs which will run for at least a year. It’s a newsletter delivered every week with an interview of a person about their blog. I’ve signed up and hope to add some interesting feeds to my RSS off the back of it.

When I started this site, I was just a 19-year-old looking to have fun on the internet. After all the twists and turns, I’ve come back around to a very similar place. Now, I’m a 31-year-old who’s still looking to have fun on the internet, share my thoughts and experiences, and make friends. That’s what this blog is for, and I’m really happy with where it’s landed.

Devon Dundee posting about his journey with his blog tells a similar tale to the story of my blog. Mine started when I was 20 and has been through many different iterations since. I recently switched back to WordPress in an effort to return to an easy way to post, have fun, and have a place to share that’s mine and no one else’s.

Back on Wordpress. It’s been a few years and many attempts to revitalise my blog, but I’ve decided to move back to Wordpress. The ease of posting from any device using apps has trumped everything else. Things will be a bit rough over the next few days and weeks as I get old posts back but stay tuned for more.

This post was written when this blog was based on Jekyll before I moved back to Wordpress. I have kept it as part of the history of this blog.

It’s taken me a long time with lots of googling and trial & error, but I finally have tags working on this site.

Out of the box Jekyll provides a tagging function. You can define tags at the start of blog posts along with the other data you wish to add, but annoyingly Jekyll doesn’t automatically provide archive pages.

When I first built this version of my site I started to add tags to my blog posts. I managed to figure out how to display them on each posts page but that was as far as I got. I made a couple of attempts at adding the functionality I wanted to the tags in the form of a page for each tag that lists the post attached to the tag. I wanted people to be able to click on the tags at the bottom of the posts and go to the tag page, and I wanted to list all the tags in use on the site in the archive page.

Finally today I came across this list of Jekyll plugins. In the list was a plugin designed to generate archive pages for years, months, days, categories, and tags. With the aim of todays tinkering focused on getting tags working I limited the archive plugin to just generate the pages for tags. Joyfully it worked first time. It took me some playing around with the templates to get them looking how I wanted, but I had pages generated for each tag and links to each page from the bottom of the posts.

The final task was getting a list of tags on the archive page. It took a lot of googling and faffing but eventually I managed to achieve what I wanted.

Now I just have to spend a bit of time making sure everything is tagged up as I want before I can explore how to make use of the tags in other ways.

This post was written when this blog was based on Jekyll before I moved back to WordPress. I have kept it as part of the history of this blog.

When I moved the blog to Jekyll last year I made several decisions about the posts I would bring across. One of those was to drop several of the post types that I’d added over the years leaving only a normal blog post as the type of content I could post. I hoped that by stripping out all the cruft I would be able to focus more on my own writing and build up more of a routine to posting. Inevitably that hasn’t panned out. There have been times where I’ve posted regularly, but just as I felt like I was getting into some kind of pattern things would happen and I wouldn’t post.

Of course one thing that has never changed was that I still read articles. In fact this year I’ve focused more on RSS as a means of reading and as a result I’m reading far more than I used too. I’ve also adopted Good Links as my read later app of choice and am developing a reading work flow to help me process what I’m reading. Part of that process involves sharing what I read. So for the same reason I added the ability to share links on my blog many years ago I’ve added that ability to this one. It’s in a state I call earliest usable product like much of this blog is, but I intend to keep improving things continuously over the next few weeks.

Part of my approach to the new year involved rediscovering one of my habits. I’ve been trying to write a blog post more often. I initially intended to use my Micro.blog and to post all my content there, but given the chance to reflect I realised I wanted my longer posts to live here. I’m not committing to a set number of posts per week, but I am committing to posting here more often.

All week I’ve been thinking about what to write about. Everytime I opened my iPad and sat down to write something I couldn’t think of anything to write. It started to become a problem. I wanted to write a post, but I didn’t know what to write. I wanted to write a post but I began to feel like I didn’t have anything to say. I wanted to write but I began to believe I didn’t have anything to say or write.

This is evening as I sat here recovering from my counselling session I was bumbling around on the internet. Something made me google a photographer whose blog I used to follow years ago. I even have one of his photos. To my delight I found his website and realised he was still blogging regularly. As I scrolled through his posts I came across one titled Stop hiding behind complexity. The first line struck me:

Whether we like to admit it or not, we sometimes enjoy making the simplest task more difficult because it's easier to blame the many loops it would have taken to finish it if we don't succeed.

I realised perhaps this is what I’m doing with my blog. I want to write a post but I think that I need to write something significant. Instead of sitting down to write something, be it about something I’ve read or done this week, I’m making the simple task complicated. The likelihood is that it’s easier to not post something and hide behind the thought that I have nothing to say than it is to open Obsidian and write until I’ve put something together worth posting. If I want to write for my blog more often, it should be as simple as writing a post and publishing it. No second guessing myself and no worrying about whether I have something to say. Just writing.

One thing I want to do more of this year it to write. Back when I started blogging in 2005 or 2006 I used to post everyday, often more than once. It might have been the novelty of being able to write something and have it appear on the internet for people to read that made it easier. It might also have been that the blogging community was in full force at the time, but one thing is for certain it was my hobby and I enjoyed it.

Since those heady days of the my blog something has gone astray. It might have been that all the bloggers I followed at the time became “serious” about blogging. They made careers out of it, and it made me feel like I had to be “serious” as well. Twitter also had a large impact. A lot of people, myself included, became more focused on posting there than on their blogs. Sharing took place there, but it lacked the same feel. What I do know is that somewhere along the way the joy of blogging disappeared and I lost interest.

Over the years I’ve tried to kick start the habit again but it’s never lasted more than a couple of weeks. This Christmas I’ve had some time to think and reflect over the events of the last couple of years. One thing that has become clear is that I lack a hobby, something for myself, and I want a hobby as much as I’ve realised I need one. I’ve decided that one of my intentions this year is to blog more, to find my hobby again and write for me. I try to journal most days in Obsidian which helps my mental health, but I want my blog to be more. So I’m starting off in January with a simple goal. To post something at lest once a day. Whether it’s a thought, or a link, or a longer piece is irrelevant, I want to make the act of posting a habit again. Most importantly I want to find the joy of sharing again.