I have been publishing a new post every day since mid September. I’ve had a good time doing it, and I’m going to continue on into next year unless something happens. But I do have to wonder, does publishing too much bug those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed? Do the people who post four or five times a day, usually short posts, come across as spammy? Is there such a thing as too many posts?

So, for the last few months, I’ve used Hyvor for the comments on this blog. This was after trying a few times to get it right with free and open source options. I like Hyvor a lot, but it has one HUGE problem: it’s expensive. And I’m not talking like 30 bucks a year, it’s 140 bucks a year. That’s absurd for a blog commenting system, at least for a small blog that only a handful of people will ever even want to comment on.

If you look at the end of this post, you’ll see that I now have something new on my site. I can now assign a blog post to a series, and it will put a series map at the end of the post. It really just uses something similar to tags to do this, but it will allow me to create groups of posts that were written in series about a certain topic. In this case, it will be Blog Updates.

So, when trying to come up with a topic for today, I had several in mind. One thing I’ve taught myself to do, however, is check my Archives page to ensure I haven’t written about a topic before.

Now, I don’t see anything wrong with talking about a topic more than once. Goodness knows, I’ve talked about notes on this blog a lot. But I don’t want to basically write the same blog post over and over and over again. So I always check.

I’ve had some blog stats available on my About page for a while, but I wanted to see if I could make my script a little more robust. For one, I wanted more stats, but I also wanted graphs.

What I had before was a simple bash script that would post the total number of posts and the total word count. Every time I would publish a post, Hugo itself would run the script and output to a shortcode. It was janky and didn’t really count things accurately.

Back when Twitter was fun and Tumblr was new, the idea of posting small blogs, or “micro blogging”, caught the public’s eye. For those of us who found regular, long-form, blogging to be too overwhelming, posting a little thought here or their on our micro blog would allow us a foot in the door without the stress of WordPress. It also allowed for much easier community building when all the bloggers were on the same platform.

Maybe it’s because I edit for a living, but I hate editing my own blog posts. I write them, why should I also have to edit them? 😢 But I do it. Maybe I don’t do it as well as I do it for my job, but I do it. I think mostly it’s shame that drives it. I don’t want to put something out there, even if its for free on my blog, that isn’t readable. I know that if I see a blog post from someone else that is littered with spelling errors and grammar issues, I judge them. A little bit. Maybe that’s because of my profession, but I can’t help it. And it seems a bit silly for me to judge others when I can’t put forth the effort to make sure I’m crossing all of my T’s and dotting all the I’s.

During a break today, I watched a YouTube video about how to promote yourself, and the creator talked about newsletters.

Now, maybe I’m out of touch, but I thought newsletters were a thing of the past. I know anything like that on my end goes right to spam. I also don’t sign up for newsletters, so maybe that’s why I really don’t get any. 🤣

But all this got me thinking: should I have a newsletter? On one hand, it would be cool for some of my work or whatever to go to people who want it in that fashion (if those people exist). On the other hand, it just seems like spam.