I Went to the Blog Store

I’ve had some ideas on a blog engine for a while based on Make (which is a probably a topic for a another blog post). What I haven’t had is a good reason to create any content. My main concerns were who would want to read it? Why bother? Since those questions went unanswered, the content went uncreated.

I happened to read some blog posts all around the same time - 100 days to offload, Roman Zolotarev’s opinions on setting up a static site, and Drew Devault’s post actually offering money to blog. I was convinced that I should blog peer pressured into thinking that it would be fairly simple to do with nothing more than what I already had.

The question then became what do I write about? That’s a little tricky.

At first I thought “Anything I suppose?” Though that leads me to a dead end; I never start. My golf coach always told me during practice that if I wasn’t aiming at something when I swung the club that I should have just stayed home for all the good it would do me. If you don’t know which point you want the ball to get to, how do you make adjustments or determine whether or not you got there? If I blogged about “anything” I might as well stay home.

Now my answer is “something”. It’s concrete and I can point to it. I just set up some reverse DNS records on my home network. I should blog about that (TODO)! My wife and I have been baking some killer bread during this quarantine. I should blog about that too (TODO)! How am I gonna serve up all this sweet sweet content? I should blog about that three (TODO lists are great)!

The last question is “How do I want to write whatever it is I’m writing about?” Haven’t fully fleshed that out yet, but given my fondness for plain text, my full-on religious conversion to vim, and wish for simplicity, I came up with a Makefile, a markdown post, and an oddly obssessive need to twiddle with the css. You can check out the results on my git repo).

That’s probably enough for now Let’s get to those TODOs shall we?

– Jared

100 Days: Day 1