I didn’t come up with the idea of a /now page. As with most things when it comes to blogging, I stole the idea from @Joel. But I really like the idea, and I’m working on expanding the things I put on that page, along with the other slash pages I’ve created.

I think this is an important topic, because it reminds us that blogs are about more than just the posts. They are repositories for our lives in many ways. A lot of people, myself included have a page for what we’re reading, some have a page dedicated to the beers they drink, while others have dedicated pages to what they’ve been watching. These are just some of the ideas people have had. It expands the scope of your blog into a true portfolio of things you want to share with your audience. Or, things you simply just want a record of yourself.

One thing is for sure, having a blog has meant sharing more online. It isn’t a consequence that I forsaw when I started this here blog. But as I’ve gone through, and written 114 posts in 7 months, I find that I’m sharing more than I ever have before.

I’ve been on social media since before Facebook, and that was 2004. I was the sort of social media user who posted pictures of their lunch and alerted all of their 4 followers that they had arrived home from work. Fascinating stuff.

Maybe I just have odd ears, but I’ve never found a pair of in ear earbuds that actually fit my ears. Oh, if they have wings on them or whatever, they’ll stick in, but that seems like cheating, and those too can be very uncomfortable. The promise of earbuds is that you don’t have to have heavy, hot, and obnoxious headphones over your ears. The reality is that the convenience comes with a big downside: comfort, fit, and often, pain.

So yesterday, I wrote about my home lab fiasco. I’ve managed to get some things set back up now, but it’s time for the report of what all I lost because of my poor backup habits.

First, I was able to salvage my RSS feeds and my Linkding stuff. That was the most important part for me, so I’m quite happy. I ended up losing my castopod setup, my glace setup, and my searx history.

I thought I learned this lesson years ago, but apparently not. I have a small homelab. It is just Proxmox on an old HP workstation that has way more memory and CPU power than I really need. I love it, though, and it has been fun to tinker with. I have known for ages that I needed a better backup solution for the server itself. Proxmox has a backup server project that would have been perfect.

A few days ago, JCPROBABLY wrote this post about finding and maintaining friendships as an adult. I found this blog post amazing and very insightful. It also made me think about the status of my own friendships.

The truth is, in the real world (i.e. outside the internet) I don’t have many friends. I work from home, I don’t get out that much, and I’ve always been reticent about actually talking to people. So, I’ve never been great at making friends, even when I was younger and around more people. As I get older, I get even less interested in interacting with new people. Part of that is just general apathy about people and relationships caused by decades of being a loner. Even when I do have to socialize with people for work or whatever, I’m more interested in when I can stop doing that than actually making new connections.

I’ve been writing a lot about blogging during Blaugust, but I’m fascinated by the whys and hows of why people write and read blogs. Back when Blaugust first started, I wrote about how I subscribed to every Blaugust participant’s RSS feed. I’ve weeded quite a few out since then (people who don’t capitalize their letters, and ones that just aren’t my style), but I still have almost 150 new feeds that are seemingly constantly updated.

I’ve seen several people, including myself, talk about not having something to blog about. When we undertake these blogging challenges, we often suffer from the idea that every blog post needs to be “epic,” or perhaps “revolutionary.”

I’m not sure about other people, but I feel that pressure. The pressure not only to write everyday, but to make the blog posts matter. After all, I’m writing this, I want people to want to read it. Blogging about some nonsense that nobody should care about would make it a waste of time!

In 2020, which seems like forever ago, I set out on a quest to type faster. I chose to do this for several reasons. First, I worked at the time as a writer, so typing faster meant I could get my assignments done more quickly. Second, it seemed like something I could dedicate myself to each day and see actual progress. So, I stared spending 10 to 20 minutes every day on monkeytype practicing. I attempted to change to a few different keyboard layouts, but none of those really stuck around.