I have had dozens of accounts like these through the years. The online presence, screaming into the public void. I pretty consistently feel exposed and/or vain after some time and then I dismantle them. Fortunately I have private archives of a lot (not not all) of the content.

After seeing 100DaysToOffload mentioned on the fediverse, I figured I’d try to take up the challenge. I would like to have a bit more of an online presence, especially if I can mix some technical posts in there. I really enjoy reading others’ blogs and musings. I also really enjoy the “small web” or the “indie web” or whatever we’re calling it these days. Less ads, less corporate interest, more content for content’s sake, more helping people, more ephemeral amusement.

I would also like to spend more time with my private personal diary. At the moment, I generally only dump negative thoughts into it to get it off my head. I would like to start treating it more like an inventory of my days. When I post here, I’m going to also try to make a private entry for myself while I’m at the keyboard.

Beyond that, I feel like more long form writing will help me focus and be more creative. It may not be perfectly edited (or edited at all) but it’ll give me some sort of outlet for practice.

So with that, I close post zero. Perhaps it’s cheating to have the first post be about posting? There will be greater variety over the next year if I manage to stick with this and not feel like I’ve over-committed myself to too many things.

#100DaysToOffload

Through the years, I’ve had many blogs and I almost always took them down after an arbitrary period of time. Typically this is because I’ve felt vain or exposed or I ran out of steam. I’ve realized that blogs that are simple outlets can be ephemeral and/or infrequently updated.

For some time now I’ve had a goal in the back of my mind to start re-publishing old posts from my old blogs as well as some of the older pages I’ve had on my websites. I have a great deal of archives and I think it’s something I don’t want to automate. Going over the posts manually and re-creating them might be a nice trip down memory lane. The advent of markdown and services like WriteFreely may make this a little easier.

I’m going to modify the WeblogPoMo2024 challenge a bit. I’m going to make an earnest effort for 14 days to post daily. This will help me build up a new series of posts and it will let me get the most out of my trial run of a write.as subscription. If this doesn’t work out, I might try another 14 days with a static site generator.

So far, I like write.as. I can export my posts and it feels a lot like projects such as Federated Wiki (https://fed.wiki.org). A clean combination of new web technologies, tried and true plain text, modern federation, and minimal UI. I believe this will set me up for success in this challenge.

Given that these posts are simply markdown, I can draft posts in Markor Notes on my phone wherever I happen to be. I can also work on them directly in my text editor before pasting them into the wonderful distraction-free UI that WriteFreely provides.

Looking forward to seeing how this progresses!