Benad's Web Site

So, I ended this one year experiment of posting one blog post per day for a full year. I started with Posterous before it was acquired (and left for dead) by Twitter, before there was even a proper backup tool for it. I eventually moved to blog.benad.me and settled to Squarespace, though quickly updating to version 6 was a bad decision. Over time, the iPad app for Squarespace was fixed faster than the iPhone version, so my routine settled to Byword and the Squarespace app to post.

Apart from a day, I managed to do it. What I learned from it isn't as much about being disciplined, but instead how to keep enough spare time and mental energy to post something at least slightly insightful each day. In a way, from the process, I've learned how much mental energy I need to write "proper", be it after a hard day at work or while I'm sick (or both), which would partly explain the 2-4 paragraphs structure my posts now have.

Is my writing any better now than it was in 2011? Until I re-read myself, I can't say, and I'm not bothered to do so, since that wasn't the original intention in the first place. But now I feel like I got a grasp of the tools and the challenges in writing anything more involved than a few (366) blog posts.

Some observations:

• I stopped tagging my posts a while ago, especially since that Squarespace 6 move. Maybe I should revise the posts and minimally tag them.
• It seems like I managed to not (completely) repeat myself from one post to another, though maybe I did so only because I kept every single post short and to the point.
• Squarespace isn't good blogging platform. I may yet again move the blog to some Wordpress on my own site, or maybe even some XSLT template with some Perl cruft to generate indices and tag clouds, since nothing beats read-only HTML for security.
• Markdown syntax is pretty well designed. Better than Mediawiki's, not as crazy as YAML, and with the right apps can be quite convenient to write even on cellphones.
• Even if I used the iPad as my main writing platform, nothing beats a full Mac to type a lot. Nothing beats it when copy-pasting links and multitasking. Sadly, it seems like computers are going in the direction of "content consumption platforms".

So, this is it for now. I'll take a little break from that insane amount of blogging, and maybe focus on longer articles for my main site under "Articles".

Published on December 31, 2012 at 19:47 EST

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