Series: How I blog
Posts about this blog and how I approach writing online.
One year of blogging
Today marks the first anniversary of the start of my blog (and, by a slightly contrived coincidence, my thousandth blog entry). It’s been a fun year. Here are my highlights—if you can’t stand lengthy self-congratulatory bullet points, stop reading now.
[... 666 words]Blogmarks
This entry was going to be another list of links, together with a note about how much I really needed to set up a separate link blog. Then I realised that it would make more sense just to set one up so that’s exactly what I’ve done. I still need to implement the archive but it’s getting dark so I’m posting this and heading home.
[... 211 words]1000th Blogmark
I just posted my 1000th blogmark. I can’t emphasize enough how much of an impact this 15 minute hack has had on both my browsing and my blogging habits. While I still tend to leave browser windows open for days at a time, I now at least have a procedure for getting rid of the ones that still interest me. More importantly, having blogmarks has eliminated the temptation to write a full blog entry (with quotation) just to share a link. This has dramatically reduced my posting rate, but has meant that when I do post an entry I usually have something moderately interesting to say.
[... 181 words]Implementing faceted search with Django and PostgreSQL
I’ve added a faceted search engine to this blog, powered by PostgreSQL. It supports regular text search (proper search, not just SQL“like” queries), filter by tag, filter by date, filter by content type (entries vs blogmarks vs quotation) and any combination of the above. Some example searches:
[... 3,103 words]One year of TILs
Just over a year ago I started tracking TILs, inspired by Josh Branchaud’s collection. I’ve since published 148 TILs across 43 different topics. It’s a great format!
[... 224 words]Twenty years of my blog
I started this blog on June 12th 2002—twenty years ago today! To celebrate two decades of blogging, I decided to pull together some highlights and dive down a self-indulgent nostalgia hole.
[... 4,455 words]What to blog about
You should start a blog. Having your own little corner of the internet is good for the soul!
[... 502 words]Semi-automating a Substack newsletter with an Observable notebook
I recently started sending out a weekly-ish email newsletter consisting of content from my blog. I’ve mostly automated that, using an Observable Notebook to generate the HTML. Here’s how that system works.
[... 2,520 words]A homepage redesign for my blog’s 22nd birthday
This blog is 22 years old today! I wrote up a whole bunch of higlights for the 20th birthday a couple of years ago. Today I’m celebrating with something a bit smaller: I finally redesigned the homepage.
[... 314 words]My approach to running a link blog
I started running a basic link blog on this domain back in November 2003—publishing links (which I called “blogmarks”) with a title, URL, short snippet of commentary and a “via” links where appropriate.
[... 1,511 words]