Blogging – Jack Baty – Snippets

Red Sweater Blog – MarsEdit 4 Public Beta

Wed, 28 Jun 2017 19:52:35 +0000

Red Sweater Blog – MarsEdit 4 Public Beta:

The good news? MarsEdit 4 is finally shaping up. I plan to release the update later this year.

I love MarsEdit so much that an update could trigger yet another re-configuration of my blogging setup.

It’s just that I love static sites so much

Mon, 05 Jun 2017 11:48:24 +0000

It may be happening again and I don’t know how to stop it.

The better I get at using my favorite tools for publishing a static site the more I want to always do it that way. WordPress is good at its job but I never feel comfortable with it.

So for now, I have two blogs.

Facebook vs the Open Web

Fri, 02 Jun 2017 17:16:03 +0000

Lots of discussion this week around Facebook vs the Open Web.

Colin Walker:

The sad thing is that most don’t care about the open web or about content longevity.

Colin reiterates that most people don’t care about all this open web nonsense. They just want to find and interact with their friends. I agree with him.

However, just because a lot of people don’t care about something doesn’t make it unimportant. The open web is important.

Walker again:

Ephemera has taken over because most aren’t creating anything that needs to be retained beyond the context of the current conversation.

Much of Facebook is useless chit chat that no one will miss when it’s gone. Still, I believe it is a mistake to think that we already know what should be retained for future generations. And in Facebook’s case, nothing is retained for future generations.

Of course we don’t need everything, but there are too many babies being thrown out with all that bathwater; deliberately, unnecessarily, and for the wrong reasons.

Many will just move on, but I intend to keep helping people care about the open web and its preservation, even if it sometimes feels like a lost cause.

Ref: Gruber, Winer, Hewitt.

Scripting News: May 31, 2017

Wed, 31 May 2017 17:10:21 +0000

Dave Winer:

Innovation. I am now storing the OPML file for this blog in my Dropbox folder. I think I just recreated Fargo. I’ll let you know.

I hope so. I really liked using Fargo. I’d like to blog the way Dave blogs and his tools have typically suited his style.

When site speed metrics make you do something silly

Sat, 27 May 2017 16:58:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I moved my blog from a static site at baty.net into WordPress at baty.blog. I don’t know how it’ll all turn out but that’s where we are now.

My page speed scores dropped considerably after moving to WordPress but it’s a sacrifice I’ll make for the convenience and interop of a dynamic site.

I got to wondering how high I could get my speed score on the old static site. I believe that watching any metric too closely is dangerous and can lead to all sorts of poor decisions. “Getting the numbers up” at all costs is an attitude best avoided.

Ignoring my own advice, I made a new, super-minimal Hugo theme just to see what effect it had on the speed tests. The theme is based on http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ and is the simplest possible thing, within reason. I added minor styles to a couple of things just so it was ever-so-slightly easier to look at and read. Here it is.

It may have been a silly and unnecessary thing to do, but it worked. Here’s the new score…

JSON Feed Now Available for baty.blog

Fri, 26 May 2017 11:45:38 +0000

I’ve gotten over my initial shrugging-off of JSON Feed (see Dave Winer on JSON Feed).

There is now a JSON feed for baty.blog posts and you’ll find it here: https://baty.blog/feed/json.

Sat, 13 May 2017 01:51:56 +0000

I’m pretty sure we’re all overthinking this microblog thing but I can’t help overthinking this microblog thing.

Baty.blog

Sat, 06 May 2017 19:54:19 +0000

I’m moving my blogging to a new domain: baty.blog

I wanted to change the way I handle my blog but I didn’t want to burn down 17 years of baty.net history to do it.

I could have used a subdomain of baty.net, but I love blogs and the .blog TLD nicely promotes the idea that blogs are still a thing.

So baty.blog it is.

Posts here will be pretty much the same as always. I’m planning to include more microblog-type posts and send everything to micro.blog for distribution.

There is no grand design here, I was just getting bored lugging around 17 years of posts. I’m using WordPress, which makes everything easy. My infatuation with static blogging tools remains, but my patience with them hasn’t. I just want to type some words and click “Publish”.

baty.net remains as-is for now. It’s nothing but static HTML so it’ll just sit there nicely, forever I hope.