Another day, another tweak I’m making to my blog. Today’s task, alongside sorting out the navigation to display better, was adding some content to my Posts page. On my old blog, this page listed all the tags I have and a few examples of the posts found in them, so I set about doing exactly that.
Add A Filter After attempting to write my own code to pull out the latest five posts from a specific tag, I stumbled across Max Böck Github repo with an example of how to display webmentions.
James Somers encouraging more people to write:
More people should do what I’m doing right now. They should sit at their computers and bat the cursor around — write full sentences about themselves and the things they care about.
This is an old post, and reminiscent of many newer versions I have linked to but it captures what I experience perfectly. When I am motivated to write, and that doesn’t come easily, the world seems different.
Really early on a Sunday morning, and with sore legs from a long run the day before I took my Richo GRiiix out in Grantham to see what I could find. The answer was not a lot, but I loved the cold air but nice low sunshine. This is where my street photography excels.
One of the great things about making your own website is that you can build new things. One of the worst things about making your own website is that you keep building new things. After web mentions and a way to publish easily, the next thing on my list was a blogroll. Not just a page people can go to, but a way to surface the things I like to everyone who happens to visit my website.
In keeping with my ways, as soon as I published my rather long-winded method of pulling in pseudo webmentions, I knew I wasn’t satisfied. Functioning is one thing, but seeing all the code on a page and having trouble following it myself gave me a headache. I began working on updates I had planned for a few weeks later.
I am now just using the Mastodon API to pull in all the information I want to display.
I’ve been struggling to write about much else besides writing. Sure, it’s occupying much of my time right now, but it isn’t a subject I typically cover. This isn’t a ‘worry’, but a post I read earlier highlighted factors that might be affecting my slump.
A post on the Meadow blog, about reading lots of blogs to be able to write widely, states:
There are no real guidelines on how to create posts.
This week I have been building parts of my blog, to learn and to get it to a point that I am happy with. A large part of this was webmentions, and thanks to a few excellent guides I got 90% of the the way their. With only a few design things to think through I read more posts on webmentions and realised the way I was doing it was the best solution for privacy and so here we are with a reduced version.
For the last few weeks, I’ve fallen out with myself and the place I publish all of my things online. I don’t want to go into the specifics, but I turned back from the brink not that long ago and don’t want to again. As such, I’ve been learning to build my own static blog with 11ty. It’s slow-going, but that’s the point.
If I am honest with myself, hosting my blog and everything else with micro.
It’s less than 24 hours until Valentine’s Day, but this post isn’t about my wife. Although she is great. It’s about the very real love I have for running again, and it’s all because I gave myself something that I couldn’t get out of.
A couple of years ago, I was in a bad way. Despite loving running my whole life, health issues caused me to just about give up on it.
It seems my throwaway post about not publishing to my blog gained some traction. Many people took it as it was intended, a commentary on it being too easy to reply and push it in front of my face, but many more people did not.
It’s a shame to see it used as some kind of signifier of privilege. Before I published, I did wonder if it would be yet another reason to ignite something beyond its intention—particularly on micro.