I’m going to be turning this daily blog into (mostly) a journal. A maker’s journal. A tool to help me talk about the work I want to do, and to force me to actually do it. If you want to write about your work, it turns out you have to do the work. Some stuff to figure out first though.
One of the first things on my mind is which tools I’ll use. At the time of writing, my tech stack is super simple, because it doesn’t need to be anything more: trusty old Jekyll, hosted via GitHub pages. It doesn’t get much more simple—I just push markdown to the main branch and it’s live in minutes. I love it. Always have. But will it serve me?
The answer is probably “probably.” I’ve never included images in my posts here so far, but inevitably I’ll want to in a maker’s journal. I’ll probably want to include video occasionally, too. I’ll want to include audio (and I’m not sure how yet). I can do all of that with GitHub and GitHub pages (with LFS for the images and video) but it always feels a bit icky for some reason? I’m not sure why. It’s probably fine.
The other thing I’m thinking about, probably prematurely, is that I’d like some sort of newsletter functionality. The work I want to make I’ll eventually want to offer to people, and it would be useful to start (slowly) understanding who those folks might be. I don’t have any analytics, I don’t collect emails, I just put stuff out there and occasionally it comes back. Plenty of options here. Buttondown, Ghost, whatever.
Ghost is probably the front-runner, actually, but I’d need to let go of my obsession with markdown files. If I can’t let go, I’ll just keep things here, figure out the large file stuff, use something like Buttondown, and crack on with it. There’s always just something so tempting about the idea of the tool that does it all. They never do though, really.
In some ways this is the first journal entry, but it doesn’t really feel like it. I’m thinking of three tags: journal, essay and meta. There would be a journal post every day, but I might occasionally post something meta about the journal itself (like this) and will definitely spin out longer essays. Kind of like A Year with Swollen Appendices. kind of.