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Do any of you have blogs?
If you do, link them in this thread! A bit of writing's always fun, (and selfishly, I've got a new RSS reader to break-in,) and Tildes is built around the transfer of ideas, so why not share?
My blog is called Hook’s humble homepage (have had it for some while now – see this post for its migration history). Tech-wise the latest instalment is hosted on my own little ARM server and running Pelican.
The two main topics are FOSS and law, but I occasionally blog about other stuff as well – e.g. about tea (more so lately) and shaving with DE blades, or sailing (less so lately).
For easier navigation there four big categories (Anima – about life, Ars – about art, Ius – about law, and Tehne – about tech) as well as a number of tags (e.g. Books, Culture, Patents, Programming, Stop and smell the roses, …) to enrich them. Apart from the main RSS/Atom feed, all categories and tags have their own feeds as well, so if anyone would be following my blog (outside a few planets/aggregators), they can mix-and-match what they are interested in.
Since the last server migration and job change I haven’t found enough time to blog, but I do intend to pick up the pace again :)
Haha, what are the odds! :D
What’s your main DE blade?
My favourites are old stock Tiger (there are new ones as well, but different) from Czechia. But I recently found some Gillette ones that come pretty close – yeah, I need to update my fave list.
Yeah, start small and simple. If you self-host, go for a static HTML generator (e.g. Pelican, but there are others as well) and forget about hosting comments – it will save you many many administration and security headaches.
Oh, wow! I never even knew that DE razors existed prior to reading your blog. I think I'm going to run out and buy one later today based on your recommendations :)
If you don't mind, I'd love to borrow your naming scheme for my own blog; it's deliciously elegant. Also, would you be willing to share how you achieved separate RSS feeds for categories and tags? Maybe even release the source code?
Feel free :)
It’s a feature of Pelican that you can simply turn on or off in its config file – see relevant part of its docs
Thank you so much! Good luck to you and yours :)
Haha, I don’t know if you’re joking or not …they’ve been around for a long long time.
Anyway, my approach to it differs from most enthusiasts.
People who make shaving a hobby often own different razors (the handles holding the blades) and other equipment, as depending on how much of the blade it exposes it cuts either more (“aggressive” – i.e. can shave off some skin) or less (may leave some stubble). We’re taking about a scale in μm here.
The way I approach it though is that I got myself a rather standard (but nice) razor, which is mediocre when it comes to aggressiveness and then test(ed) different DE blades, since those cost peanuts and also very in sharpness and length (again in μm).
I'm not joking! I've truly never looked into improving my shaving technology before now. If you had spoke with me yesterday, I could only attest to the existence of straight, cartridge, and electric razors. DE shaving is an entirely new concept for me.
Thanks so much for both the introduction and the tips! Any recommendations for a "standard (but nice) razor" for which to purchase blades?
Also, I suppose I didn't edit my original comment quickly enough, but I added the following inquiry:
Hehe, glad to help :)
I’m quite happy with my Edwin Jagger (they tend to make heads for other brands as well). If I didn’t get it, I would probably get a Mühle or Merkur.
If you can get your hands on an old Gillette or Parker – those are great. There are several new brands nowadays as well.
The only one I would probably avoid is Feather. Feather blades are super sharp and aggressive, so to make up for that, their razor is hides more of the blade. Which means that most other blades in it will seem dull in comparison. E.g. Feather blades in my E. Jagger are way too aggressive to be fun.
Also do note that I usually shave with shaving oil only instead of gels or foam. Occasionally I switch to shaving creams.
I’ll reply your blog-related enquiry in its original post. Thanks for flagging it.
Ahh, thank you so much for the recommendations! And special thanks for the shaving oil idea, I hadn't even considered that.
Check out http://tryablade.com -- they use paypal for the checkout.
I'd order one or two of each of the most popular ones to see which suits you. For me, I've been using the Astra Platinums with the most success.
DE shaving is so much nicer than those multi-blade setups that tug at your hair.
The main things to remember are:
Bahahaha! Thanks for all of the recommendations! Are the brush and exfoliant necessary if I'm doing fine without them now? And what exactly do you mean by "good quality brush" and "decent exfoliant" in the first place?
A good brush is made of boar or badger fur -- I like badger. There are different grades for each. [1]
A good brush helps to soften and lift the hair so you can get a cleaner shave. Its not a requirement, but it definitely helps. It also lends to the overall ritual, which for me is equally important. :)
For the exfoliant, you want to get rid of all of that dead skin that can trap hair at a bad angle, which can lead to irritation or even in grown hairs. Typically shaving with the grain at the proper 20˚ angle will leave you clean shaven without any marks -- but having dead skin all over your face and especially neck can interfere with this.
It sounds like there's a lot to know, but there isn't. If you don't exfoliate, it won't be the end of the world.
The main process goes like this:
For the exfoliant, do that at night or whenever best suits both your schedule and the instructions.
Find a local shop or barber that carries this sort of stuff. A good brush will last a lifetime, so don't skimp. This method of shaving is by far the best since it only shaves to the skinline, unlike the multiblade systems that try to lift the hair up before shaving it -- which can lead to irritation and ingrown hairs.
I mentioned the 20˚ angle -- this is important. You want to cut the hair, not scrape your skin. You're most likely already using this angle -- but be aware of it just in case.
That pretty much covers it. Welcome to the upper echelons of grooming!
[1] https://www.gentlemansgazette.com/shaving-brush-guide/
Wow, holy smokes! I ought to print this out, and you ought to be a writer for a classy men's grooming magazine! Thank you so much for these detailed instructions; I can't wait to give your method a whirl.
When I was young I used an electric razor, then I moved to the multi-blade system for a week. I was shaving like the ads --- which looked more like a crime scene than anything.
... and that is how I tumbled down the rabbit hole of DE wet shave and overall grooming. I started cutting my own hair in 2012 and have nearly perfected fades and stuff for that classic business cut :)
Dig through https://www.reddit.com/r/wicked_edge/wiki/videos and also don't forget to pick up a styptic pencil in case you knick yourself. :)
I have this, but I don't really post to it very often.
Mine is this one. It's an anything-goes personal blog.
Hey man, good to see you here :)
Wow, good to see you too!
I have a tech blog scripter.co. The topics revolve around command line, coding (Nim, Emacs Lisp, scripting in bash/tcsh, etc.) and Emacs.
The blog source is in Org mode, which I export to Markdown using my
ox-hugopackage. I use Netlify to then generate the site using Hugo and deploy it.If interested, the source of each post can be found in the footer of that page.
This is awesome to me because I've been spending the past couple days learning org-mode and Emacs. I wanted a stable notetaking/to-do software that wouldn't become abandonware in a couple years, nor be run by a company with iffy policies/decisionmaking.
For blogging, org-mode is probably more stable than Hugo, so it's neat to leverage Hugo as middleware. Cool solution!
Glad to see that you are learning Emacs + Org Mode. I wish someone told me to do that wayy earlier in my life. :)
Yes. The Org syntax has been stable for a while now. You won't find something that you wrote in Org mode, that wouldn't render today.
My main motivation to write the ox-hugo package was to reuse all of my existing Org mode notes for publishing on my Hugo generated site. I wanted to keep on writing in the natural Org mode format, and let ox-hugo deal with the format that Hugo likes the best (Markdown) [and that it does now].
Thanks! :D
I've tried messing around with blog stuff, but I just can't find anything to write about really. I tried setting up a blog twice, but they collectively had a maximum of around 5 posts (and they were some changelogs for a small Minecraft mod I made a couple years ago, which I still doubt anybody used even though it has 1.5k downloads (just checked as I'm writing, kinda shocked how much that is for a dumb little mod))
My domain just redirects to my GitHub right now. I'd make a "portfolio" page or something like that, but I only have a single proper "thing" to put there, so it'd look empty.
I'd love to know if someone has advice on stuff like this.
Edit: I did a thing! I have no idea what direction this will go in, but let's just hope it doesn't die out like most of my side projects.
Yeah, same. I have tried a few times too, but as it turns out I am just not that interesting and/or interested in, opinionated or even care enough about "stuff that matters" to anyone else to justify having a blog, let alone one that will actually get enough traffic to make it a worthwhile effort to maintain. ;)
Same. My style of writing is just letting the words flow out of my mind. It's a mess to read without prior editing.
https://www.xkcd.com/621/
Writing a blog would be difficult if your aim is to get a strong readership right away.
Here's what worked for me, and motivates me to write.. for selfish reasons. I wrote about stuff that caused me spend time to solve a problem that I faced (no matter how trivial that problen might be to others, or how useless that solution might be).
"This is my blog, and I have the freedom to write whatever I want, for my future reference."
It becomes easy then.
A major hurdle for me to start writing was to get the right blogging flow. Setting the front-matter, making mass updates to those across multiple posts, typing in Markdown, etc. always came in the way.
Once I figured out that I can keep writing blogs in Org mode as I already did for my work notes, that barrier went away.
So think about how you like to write stuff, and see if you can channel that same energy and flow towards blogging.
Everyone always has something interesting to say.
[Post here
if andwhen you have your blog up :)]I finished adding HTML export support to my note taking tool a couple hours ago (still on a seperate branch), so my (currently basically nonexistent) list of notes probably the closest thing to a blog I'm looking forward to write.
Now I just need to look around my system to see what I can write about. Also finding a way to make it easy to export to my server, which sounds like a great first note idea.
EDIT: Here it is. I wrote the "note" and done everything simultaneously, so that's exactly how everything happened. That's definitely an interesting way of writing, and I kinda like it. Let's see if there will be another one.
That's awesome! Keep it going! In no time, you will end up with your self-reference system that you can grep locally and/or search in your site. You'll thank yourself :)
My blog is primarily about coding and gets updated whenever I find something I think is worthy of sharing, sometimes it's a lot and sometimes it's not much. https://theswitchstatement.com/
I have a quite infrequently updated blog here which started out as tutorials, tests and demos for work stuff but now I just put whatever on there.
Very cool! Are you silversmithing as a hobby?
Nope, work. I spent ten years as a developer/sysadmin but burnt out largely due to RSI problems. So now I make shiny things for people, which I can do part-time and on my own schedule. It's considerably less profitable, but it's something I can do and I rarely end the day in debilitating pain.
Ironically I now program stuff as a hobby.
Nice, that sounds really cool! 😀
Marvelous - I've done hobby silversmithing, casting and PMC work, but mostly lapidary now.
Oooh, pretty rocks! I've always fancied having a go at lapidary but I already have a workshop overflowing with equipment, no room for any more!
Thank you! It's funny, I loved metalwork, particularly casting, but the required space and equipment investment (pun not intended) aren't justified unless you're doing it professionally. Lapidary work can actually be done in much less area, with less cost and fewer safety precautions. I say it was a hobby, but I was earning a significant amount from selling artisan cuts, and might still do it for retirement (someday!) income.
Mine is just a bunch of general nonsense which has settled mostly into hiking and Game Boy modification. However, when the categories of "Chinese-knockoff iPod Nano review" and "High resolution original drawing of the FM Towns Marty's mascot, Mr. T" are combined, it is the #1 site on the internet.
I have a blog: nucleovores.blogspot.com
It's a bit different than the rest of you. It's a collection of short fiction stories I've written over the past 3 years or so. A lot of cerebral, stream of conscious stuff. I'd love to hear what you think of it! Thanks!
Oh my God, I love how adorable this is:
http://nucleovores.blogspot.com/2018/06/i-think-that-went-well.html
Thanks for reading!
Your blog is the kind of blog I've always wanted to have, but always gave up trying. Keep writing, you are doing great. I saved the link for later.
Thank you! I appreciate the kind words.
I've got a blog with writeups for the various projects I've made over the years. I lost some projects when the places I used to host them were taken down, so I wanted to make sure I had control over my stuff going forward, in addition to posting on places like github and imgur.
I had one called Cooking with Dogs as a sort of chronicle of my time in a couple of nursing homes and then my transition back to living in an apartment again. I ended up deleting it after I stopped blogging although I did download everything I wrote first.
My Medium is regularly updated with reviews of weight training programs I do. In fact, a new one is going up sometime today. I also do a more "blog" style post once or twice a month too, trying to relate knowledge gained at the gym to the real world or the other way around.
It's here: https://medium.com/@ErikCieslewicz
You post about funneling anger was good. I near the end of year one of weight training since doing almost no exercise for 10 years. Feels good man.
I feel you on how good you feel after that first year of lifting after being inactive for a long time. I had a very similar experience. It's kind of amazing. When you're out of shape or eating unhealthy you're like a frog that doesn't realize it's in water. Getting out suddenly you notice all this stuff that you assumed was just your normal life in fact was optional. The biggest thing for me was hydrating properly. I had no idea I was bumbling around dehydrated for like a decade. It's amazing how much better life is when you actually drink enough water.
I need to get on that water train!
Serious question: what makes Medium special for you as a blogger/writer?
I like the aesthetic and I don't have to work hard to get it. I used to know HTML in the 90s, but I never kept up with it and so I'm out of practice and out of date on my knowledge. I have no real desire to know the nuts and bolts of even the simple coding or whatever that makes Wordpress or Blogger work properly. Even the text formatting here on Tildes is a bit annoying because it's code based rather than a WYSIWYG editor.
Got it. So purely convenience and out of the box aesthetics. Any special useful features?
Outside of the WYSIWYG editor, nothing that I haven't noticed on other platforms. It has a stats dashboard that is fine enough for an amateur like me. It connects to your social accounts for automatic posting if you're in to that. While it has some very limited social media features, like following other authors, it doesn't feel like another time sink, it feels like a platform that will host your blog compared to like Tumblr, which gets cliquey and seems to require a lot of pruning and preening.
I have a blog where I write about hacking sometimes, I'm trying to find time for more posts. Ninja.Style
Ooh, InfoSec's so cool; and these posts are fantastic.
I have a web serial site called Codex. For those unfamiliar with web serials, it's the written equivalent of a TV show. There's an update every week, about ~3000 words long. Mine is dark fantasy that explores the consequences of unfettered magic mixed with human greed.
Depends whether or not you're willing to stretch the definition of "blog". I have a channel that's just comedic tech stories from my life.
Maybe I should actually start writing. I'm constantly having to cut down on what I say in videos or else it will just be a 15 minute video on the benefits of having a external hard drive and cloud storage..
I got one, but then i got bored from adding content and just stopped it :(
My blog is focused around my work on Gecko and Firefox at Mozilla.
I don't update it as often as I should, though I have three or four new posts in the pipe to cover my work over the course of 2018. Furthermore, since Gecko is effectively desktop software, most of the topics that I cover are fairly esoteric to most developers in 2018.
I realize that I'm not doing a very good job of self-promotion here, but it is what it is! :P
A Mozillian! I really liked the kernel extension module analogy, as someone who agreed that WebExtensions were the way to go (but admittedly is missing some of the functionality from before.)
~Also, it's a travesty that the merch store was taken down; someone hint hint should tell the higher-ups to rethink that decision.~
~...mainly saying that because I'm disappointed that Foxkeh, Kit and co. Firefox plushies are nowhere to be found without the store. They were so cute!~
Thanks! :-)
My favourite all-time discussion about the move to WebExtensions is a comment that my colleague wrote on Hacker News.
It is really unfortunate, but unlikely to be brought back, I'm afraid: my understanding is that the foundation was actually losing money on the gear store. :-(
I used to have a blog when I was in high school, but then I realized I didn't have any audience and wasn't willing to put the effort into developing one. It was really more for my mental health in any case.
Three blogs: