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.
I’ve been doing so well. I’ve been blogging every day now for over a month. But today, it has been a long day, and my brain is empty. I have a list of posts I want to do, but no ambition to actually write them. Instead, you get this. Me blogging about blogging, again.
At a certain point, the daily bloggers out there must run out of things to talk about, right? I’m sure tomorrow, I’ll be able to come up with something more better than this one, betterer. As is, instead, I’ll just say that blogging every day has been great. For the most part. But sometimes, I don’t want to blog, but I also don’t want to ruin the streak. Which feeling is stronger? Well, here’s 200 words of nonsense. I guess that’s the answer.
More updates have happened on the blog. I have a new “link” post type, that will allow me to share links to things I find interesting. This was fun to set up, and took a fair bit of doing. I wanted it to appear in the main hugo feed, and I wanted the posts to appear a bit different. At first, I thought about having a different background, but that didn’t look right. What I did instead, was make the post underline and the metadata a different color. If you go to the home page and scroll down, you’ll see my first attempt at this. I like it, though I will probably tweak it a bit in the future.
Since the last time I wrote about my updates to the blog, a lot has changed, even if it doesn’t look like it. The menu above has undergone some work. Now it is responsive, has a nice drop down menu that also works well on mobile, and looks a little better in light mode. Oh, yeah, there’s light mode now. If you’re on desktop, there is a button on the upper right that will give you a nice light mode if you want it. I’ve also made it so that it should remember your choice (that took some doing).
Back in August, I participated in Blaugust, an event where the goal was to write every single day during the month. I had a blast, and wrote all 31 days. Back earlier this year, I did a little self-created thing where I wrote for 30 days in a row. I had a great time then as well. I really actually miss challenging myself to write on this blog everyday.
So, I’m going to start up again. Even if I only write 100 words or so, I’ll be able to say I wrote something. Even if I just share a link to someone else’s blog. It still counts. My goal is to do this through the end of the year. This one counts as #1 for September 24th. I may come up with a counter to put on the about page or something like that.