Why I blog

It’s been a while since I mentioned <p>I have always wanted to write something which starts with “On…” like an author or a philosopher who will just spit their rant out for 5000 pages on a subject like behavior of humans on decision making, a huge subject of mathematical principles of natural philosophy or more honest stuff like <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/385.On_Bullshit" class="external-link" rel="noopener" target="_blank">bullshit</a>.</p> <p><strong>My admire for such text was always there although I have mostly hard time understanding such deep work</strong>. Obviously I‘m nowhere near t... why I am blogging here, and I wanted to create a dedicated post for it since Robert has started a new list about why people blog. Therefore, I want to have a list of reasons why I am blogging:

#1: to design something I love to look at

My main focus when I started was to sharpen my development skills and create my own space in this gigantic web. I have been browsing this place for almost 25 years and have stumbled upon a lot of amazing people and their designs. Traversing the web and appreciating a well-thought design feels good, but being a blogger and maintaining my own creation is amazing. In the past, I have tried many platforms and wanted to stick with them for a long time, but it has never clicked until recently, when I started with this domain and the platform of my choice. It has many modifications already, and it has been a lovely ride since, and it keeps growing and getting better every time I have an idea and try to implement it. As I mentioned here <p>Lately, I have been trying to guess how much effort I have put into the things that I’m interested in up to now and the general outcomes from them. Not like guessing a quantitative sum of it, but more like a general feeling to assess. This led me to think about the concept of this month’s IndieWeb topic:</p> <p><strong>Good Enough.</strong></p> <p>Two very powerful words. Good; not <em>perfect</em>, and enough; not <em>complete</em>.</p> <p>Not always, but from time to time, I’m struggling to escape the dungeon of perfectionism. It’s not that much of a big deal, but at s... , it will never be completely done, or I will never have the feeling of it, but that’s one of the points anyway. This is my playground, and I don’t want to give away the fun of trying something new and making it reasonable. It has a long way to go, and I am looking forward to making many more modifications.

#2: getting better at writing and explaining stuff

Another reason I started this was to transport my knowledge vault, which I created in Obsidian about electronics & software engineering, to a more carefully written space, where I could also share the bits and bolts of knowledge I gathered during my professional career as an engineer. For reason #2, though, I must say that I am quite behind schedule. There are some blocking points, one of them being that I have started coding and designing my blog from scratch (I use Astro, but it’s just for generating the static pages). I needed a little bit more than a static site generator. I am creating an interlinked garden sort of thing, and there must be some logic behind the scenes. Currently, the backlinking algorithm is quite dumb, but I have a 90% working prototype, which I have written in Rust. This is probably an overkill, but the idea is not to just implement the algorithm but to learn Rust, as I have already mentioned here <p><em>The time has come. Yes, I am jumping on that train too. I’m learning <a href="https://www.rust-lang.org" class="external-link" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Rust</a>.</em></p> <p>It’s been a while since I last learned a new programming language, aside from some <a href="https://www.lua.org" class="external-link" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Lua</a> programming related to my <a href="https://neovim.io" class="external-link" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Neovim</a> setup (which I eventually abandoned), but other than that, it’s been a while. More interestingly, I’v... . So that is my first Rust project, and I will share the details here in an update post when I feel I am done.

Additionally, traversing the pages must feel smooth, and referencing stuff for further research should also be intuitive enough. I have therefore implemented the backlinking stuff, which you might see below the post, and the hover windows, which you might check by hovering over the link mentioned <p>I have always wanted to write something which starts with “On…” like an author or a philosopher who will just spit their rant out for 5000 pages on a subject like behavior of humans on decision making, a huge subject of mathematical principles of natural philosophy or more honest stuff like <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/385.On_Bullshit" class="external-link" rel="noopener" target="_blank">bullshit</a>.</p> <p><strong>My admire for such text was always there although I have mostly hard time understanding such deep work</strong>. Obviously I‘m nowhere near t... , but there are still some features I am working on, such as the sidenotes and being able to interact with the page to aid in reading the technical stuff.

Because of these small things, I am behind my schedule for transporting my Obsidian vault here. But again, this is my playground, and there are no deadlines.

Other than technicals though, I try to participate in indieweb stuff and try to post about actual things occasionally. Carnival posts like this one mentioned <p>Lately, I have been trying to guess how much effort I have put into the things that I’m interested in up to now and the general outcomes from them. Not like guessing a quantitative sum of it, but more like a general feeling to assess. This led me to think about the concept of this month’s IndieWeb topic:</p> <p><strong>Good Enough.</strong></p> <p>Two very powerful words. Good; not <em>perfect</em>, and enough; not <em>complete</em>.</p> <p>Not always, but from time to time, I’m struggling to escape the dungeon of perfectionism. It’s not that much of a big deal, but at s... or the Junited 2024 <p>Junited is this simple but excellent idea from <a href="https://birming.com/junited-blog-love/" class="external-link" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Robert Birming</a> and I have noticed it in my RSS feed the other day from <a href="https://thoughts.uncountable.uk/junited-2024/" class="external-link" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Chris</a>. Lovely idea! Without further ado, I start with my list and will update it during June 2024:</p> <ol> <li><a href="https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/gist-that-keeps-giving/" class="external-link" rel="noopener" target="_blank">The Gis... stuff were quite fun, and I am looking forward to participating in more.

#3: having fun

This is quite obvious to many of us, but it is IMO, the resulting factor in many reasons why we are blogging. That’s why blogging is good and that’s why it should spread more over the web, and more people should do that. Being mostly non-commercial makes it relaxed, and having your own space in this gigantic web is a good feeling.

So, I hope the reasons why I am blogging stay for a long time, and I can add more fun reasons to them in the future. Now, if you are not blogging, think about why. Maybe you will find enough reasons to start it today. I mean, I hope you do.

Cheers.