writing here and there
Lately I’ve felt this desire to change again. I’ve really enjoyed making my 11ty blog. I learned a deal about extending things. Particularly a thing I’ve found interesting and challenging is making collections. It has seemed like a core part of 11ty so making my notes show up, giving them their own RSS feed, applying some basic rules to their design, and then every so often publishing a note whether it’s a YouTube embed or an image using shortcodes has been very enjoyable. And challenging.
What I’ve found though is I seem to need change. I get wanting a different way of doing things and I have to admit it is something I really enjoy doing. Right now publishing to the blog requires some interaction with GitHub and vercel. Neither are particularly difficult but I have made errors primarily with image names and frontmatter things. One causes the image to just not show up. The second causes failed builds.
To get around the second I created a few apple shortcuts that help me create a new blog or note entry with the frontmatter fields I want. Including the current date has been very nice. Having the shortcut open iA Writer when done has been nice too. This has saved me some time and a little frustration plus I learned a little on making apple shortcuts do some lifting writing these things.
All this has been great and I have really enjoyed my 11ty blog. What it does. How it looks. How to make changes. I included a few plugins which took me a little time to figure out with the config file. Very grateful having a local development server to first see things.
I feel I’m at the point now where the site just works. It has a basic look I like. I’ve included some additional goodies like search, reading times, and related posts. All of it’s been a lot of fun but I feel like I want a change.
So what’s next? Well I really like Pika and its micropub support. How easy it is to publish there. I think what’s likely to happen is at some point I will just change things. Get the pro account. Redo dns. Start writing there. I don’t know if I’ll bring along the old writing. It’s all markdown files and a lot have image short codes in them. It’s tempting to just start again.
Or…
I’ll just stay with what I have. I do have things I’d like to change or add to the site. Owning it all means making fundamental changes is both easy and hard.
I don’t know when I’ll decide.
Could be tomorrow. Or a month from now.The basic thing is nothing really does change with how I want to write and what it is I have to say.
After some sleep
There is this sense this morning after some sleep that what I have works. That I built this thing and when I wanted more or different with it I was the change. Not a platform or service that have bigger, wider and deeper responsibilities. They have multitudes of users clamoring for a this and that. I have this thing that just works. I don’t need multiple blogs or start points. I created the notes collection mostly to see if I could. I changed a number of things to be what I wanted. There were no other users.
So what I believe this leads me to is satisfaction with what I have. This just works. I own it. I made things work and I changed the things or added as I wanted.
It’s been fun and challenging to see this become something else. If I change the blog it will not be because I’m not happy or challenged with 11ty. It will be back to the original simplicity thing and perhaps wanting a path to writing and publishing that’s different. For now, hello GitHub and vercel. You are my buddies. Until you are not.
☕️ 4 min read