This blog has been a bit quiet.

I enjoy writing about things, I have many things to write about, but I never do. Why is that? This is a kind of rambling dive into some of the reasons I have noticed.

My tools

I dislike the blogging system I have chosen.

Hugo is a fine piece of work don’t get me wrong, but for me it feels incomplete in a certain sense. The site is configured through a central config.toml and while this is a good idea on its surface, due to the freedom themes have it can lead to not fully knowing what is allowed by the theme and what is not, this can lead to a lot of time debugging themes and leads to being frustrated by the experience, especially when the theme is complex and not well documented.

as for writing my own themes while I could do so, my lack of actual design knowledge would have lead to quite a fugly experience. this is less a fault of hugo and more a fault of myself. Hugo is actually very well documented on its templates and I am sure If I ever spent time working on a theme I would have little issue.

I dislike markdown as a writing tool.

This comes onto my second point. I use emacs pretty much daily and with that comes org mode. not only is it a better system for plain text document preparation, task management and note taking, its also (subjectively) a much better markup syntax. for these reasons writing in markdown feels like a pain. now I am not stuck with it, projects like firn and ox-hugo do exist but again I have not adopted them either because it would take too much time or because from a glance I don’t like the abstraction, even if my fears are unfounded ¹

My brain

I tell myself I will come back to stuff later (and never do)

Now less on the tools and more on the user. I have a bad habit of starting things and not finishing them. I currently have 4 drafts of articles which are mostly complete, some have been sitting for months if not years. This is not even discussing the idea’s sitting in my agenda and rotting. The backlog acts as a mental barrier, “why start a new article when I have so many to finish” or so my thoughts go. Of course I could finish all of the ones of value but that requires time…

Confidence

I lack confidence in my writing, Partly due to the fact my grammar and spelling is horrid. Partly due to the fear that someone will come in and “correct” me and my mistakes. Both of these are kind of unfounded as no one but myself will read this. but it still weighs on me, of course there is the option to improve, but like most that takes time.

Time and motivation

All of these have the common thread of time, time to fix the tools, time to use a better markup language, time to improve my writing, time to improve myself . all of these could be fixed with time. The thing is I do have time. if i planned out my time better I would have enough time to write every week but no. this is not only a problem of time but of motivation. If I don’t have fun, if I don’t enjoy the tools, If I have these (artificial) mental blocks its obvious to anyone why they would not engage with something.

Well then what happens now?

well for me I think I need to spend some time working on making my blog something I like looking at and using. something I have fun writing in, something that keeps me learning. this will take time, time I am willing to spend if it means I can write more about the things I actually care about. Watch this space because hopefully more should come.