January 18, 2020
6 min read ☕️
Photo by Helloquence on Unsplash
And no, this ain't a 'going away' post, y'all. I just wanted to provide an update on where I want to take this site within the foreseeable future.
Index /
For the homepage of my site, I would like to do something new, rather than just a slightly different /blog.
The layout of this site is a derivative of the gatsby starter blog template.
I have deviated from it over time, but I just haven't put in the time to design something better and customized to what I want.
Ideally, it would just highlight the latest content, whether a blog post or a project with a short snippet of my /about page.
This leads me to my next plan...
If you're new here or unaware, I have a lot of physical side projects (e.g. fixing up my house) in flight and I post updates on my Instagram. I want to transition away from using Instagram as my content hosting platform for multiple reasons. It all boils down to being able to own my content.
In addition to hosting it myself, I want to be able to tell a story or describe what's going on in my mini-albums. I say mini-albums because instead of posting lots of individual photos, I like to group them under one post, like this one. The problem is, Instagram limits you to a maximum of 10 photos/videos per post. This leads me to a common scenario of having to pick the best 10 of many photos. It can be difficult to do this, especially when I want to show some context or scene that cannot be encapsulated within 10 items. Also, I want to be able to caption individual photos.
Will this hurt my discoverability? Sure. But, I doubt I'm getting that many impressions from Instagram hashtags. Who knows, maybe I'll just crosspost for a while and link directly to my site's posts.
Going forward, when I get around to building the infrastructure and UI, I will be hosting this content under /projects. Or maybe I'll separate out physical projects from digital ones... Who knows! I'll be a good engineer and iterate on it, but also be sure to provide updates as things change.
Blog Backlog
Up until now, I have been using the mobile and desktop note-taking app Bear to keep track of my blog post backlog.
While it's great for taking notes, I find it lacking for this purpose.
Sure, I can tag items with #blog and #blogpost, but as time has gone on, the amount of posts has grown past what the app is made for.
For starters, by default, it sorts based on last touched/edited. This is fine for notes (which I still take on the app), but not for blog posts that I want to sort in many ways. It's also difficult to mark posts as "done", figure out duplicates, and determine how many things are in my backlog (minor).
So, going forward, I will be using GitHub issues to keep track of my backlog (like a good ol' JIRA queue). This will allow me to still use tagging and descriptions, but also expose a pseudo-schedule of what's coming up. And, I will be able to support writing requests this way too (if any of y'all have any 🤷♂️). It will also be nice to have the schedule/backlog local to the site source too. Maybe this will hold me accountable as well!
If you want to submit a post request, you can here.
If you're curious about what's in my blog post backlog, you can find it under this milestone and this project.
I will be migrating from Bear to GitHub over the coming days/weeks/<insert-timeframe-here>.
The rest of the site
I still need to finish the other two locations on my site: /essays and /about.
Truth be told, I do not know what I will put under /essays that will be different than /blog.
When I started, I loved and took inspiration from James Sinclair's site.
As for the /about, I'm not sure exactly what I want to put there.
I mean, I do know, but it's kind of like when someone puts you on the spot during an icebreaker:
So, tell us about yourself!
Mind proceeds to go blank.
Last, but not least, I need to finish out the UI and infra when you click on a TAG.
Conclusion
Stay tuned! There's a lot of things to come.
👋