I’m kicking off a new challenge — blogging weekly in the first quarter of 2024, through the end of March. It’s been ages since I wrote regularly on my own website, so I’m excited to kick off a new chapter and hope you’ll follow along.
Welcome to my first post in over two years!
Bending The Rules
Wait, didn’t I say every week of Q1 2024? And aren’t we in the third week of January?
That’s right, I’m getting a late start on my own writing challenge. Busted.
However, since I also happen to be the referee in this little game that I’ve set up for myself, I’m going to interpret the rules generously: everything I did this month counts as publishing. Because I definitely wasn’t sitting on the sidelines.
The last two weeks were chock full of invisible and unglamorous prep work:
- Week 1 — I finished the transition of my hand-coded site to Astro, a static site generator, and put up a writing archive with about a dozen posts from 2019-2021, my last spate of writing.
- Week 2 — I created the RSS feed.
But enough about the technical underpinnings for now. I’ll dive into more details some other time about why I chose Astro and how I set it up.
What’s more important than the how is the why.
Why Am I Blogging Again?
The short answer: I blame my old friend Joe Crawford. And a few of his new friends he introduced me to, a small tribe of people that call themselves the IndieWeb.
The longer answer: well that’s also for another time.
Sorry for the teaser but I just need to get this first “hello world” out of my head. I’ve written and rewritten this so many freaking times that I’ve already queued up a nice healthy backlog of 4-5 separate topics. Clearly I need to practice the cadence of writing regularly again.
It’s a much longer story to recap how 2023 and the decentralized social web rekindled the flame of intrinsic motivation in a way that acted as a form of burnout recovery. It’s a topic that I bet other people can relate to and deserves its own space to breathe.
So tonight, I’m going to leave it here, keep it fun and light, and go celebrate this relaunch with my IndieWeb buds at our biweekly hangout, The Homebrew Website Club.
See You Next Week
I hope you’ll come along for the ride! Grab that RSS feed that I worked so hard on or follow along with one of the social sites in my bio below. And thank you for reading!