Fans of the blog will have spent the last decade or so becoming increasingly dissatisfied about the infrequency with which I post on here, and so have I. It's not that I don't have the time, and every so often I am still struck by inspiration for a post which never makes it up here. Part of it is doubtless down to a lack of things to say, but I think a significant part of it is that the process of writing a post and putting it up here, from start to finish, is very time-consuming for me. I fantasize about posting here regularly; perhaps every Tuesday I would sit down for an hour or two and put something up. But of course I'm very far from that place at the moment, and realistically if I was to get to that place I'd need something in the way of a production line.
To this end, I thought it'd be good to write a post with the kind of production values I'm aspiring to, in the kind of time-frame I'm aspiring to, but without putting too much pressure on the content. This way I can try to get the basic mechanics down, and once I've got that in position, the hope is that in future I'll be able to let the banger content pour out me unobstructed by practicalities, much as one might on Bluesky (other microblogging sites are of course available), or in an IRL conversation. It may take a few such test posts to get there, but this is the first. Just so that nobody who likes reading this sort of thing gets their hopes up, I have no intention of putting them out weekly at this stage.
The Template
I'm writing this on an html template that I made back in the day. I'm not what one thinks of as a person who codes, but I do write these things directly as html, because I find that if I use Blogger's wysiwyg interface things don't end up looking the way I want. Here is the template:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<font face="calibri" size="3">
<h1></h1>
<div style="line-height:1.5">
<h3>Notes</h3>
<h3>References</h3>
<ul>
<li></li>
</ul>
</div>
</font>
</body>
</html>
I am happy for you to use or adapt it for your own blogposts without acknowledgement. I had to look up how to get the html to display as plain text rather than having it behave as html. You have to replace "<" with "&_l_t_;" (minus the underscores) and ">" with "&_g_t_;" (likewise). The underscores are there because without them I don't know how to make them display as is rather than turning into "<" and ">". I considered not showing you the template at all, but I figured that my production line should allow for a certain amount of looking things up, as long as I don't get too carried away and try look up every last thing, such as the second thing which I didn't look up. It's OK to use a workaround if it's the difference between getting these things out there and having a bunch of fragments sitting on my computer.
There are a few things that aren't in the template but which I do use in my posts, for example hyperlinks, footnotes and images, but text, headings and bullet points are the main thing. I should add templates for links and notes even if not for images, but right now is writing time, not template construction time.
When I'm writing from the template, I need to save a new copy of it with the blogpost title, the date and the .html extension and save it somewhere that my Chromebook will allow me to open html files in a browser from. Then I write the post as html in Caret, periodically saving it and refreshing the version in the browser to see what it looks like. It's presumably not an optimal system but I find it fairly pleasant and it's what I'm building on at the moment. Once I've got the html document as I want it, I can paste it into Blogger, read the preview on that site, correct inevitable typos, read the preview again, and post it. This is supposed to give me control over the process rather than having to do things Blogger's way.
The Production Line
To summarize and elaborate, let's look at the production line as a set of bullet points. This will also allow me to test out another key blogging mechanic:
- Percolation: In the week leading up to sitting down to write the post, I can turn over the ideas for what I'm going to write about in my head. I might write down some notes, but on no account must anything that looks like drafting the post start early.
- Set-up: On the day, get myself somewhere I can work, close my browser tabs, locally save a version of the template with the post name and date, and open it up in the browser.
- Draft: Write the thing! Try not to stop in the middle. Write it in Caret as html and refresh the version in the browser to see what it looks like.
- Proofread: Proofread it in the browser.
- Blogger: Only at this point do I open up Blogger. I paste it into their html interface.
- Preview: Open Blogger's preview and correct any typos. I should do the corrections in Caret and paste the whole thing in again, rather than typing in Blogger and having to go backwards and forwards to get my own copy accurate.
- Final read and post: Once I've read a version in the preview that I haven't seen any typos in, I can post it to the site. For the post's keywords, choose three and don't stress too much about what they are.
- Promotion: Post the link on Bluesky or wherever I'm mostly microblogging nowadays. Watch the plaudits roll in.
Perfectionism
I think that one of the things that stands in the way of me being as prolific as I am in my fantasy is a kind of perfectionism, but I don't want to mislead: perfectionism paradigmatically has benefits and maleffects, and my variety of it is skewed towards the latter. I think my blogposts do skew towards a lack of typos, but aside from that it's really just a kind of obsessive anxiety about putting out something that's not as it should be, even in parts. Last year I did a bit of work on that particular debilitating personality trait of mine with some success, and in a more interesting post than this one I might take a little digression and talk about it, but this is just a test so I'll move on. 1
The negative aspects of perfectionism speak for themselves, I think, at least in terms of how they might slow a person down. But the positive aspects perhaps deserve a little comment. There are some things that really can't be done well if they're not done with a meticulous attention to detail. But that's not how I roll when it comes to my personal projects. I do a bit of html but don't know how to make "&_l_t_;" display without the underscores, I learned Esperanto on Duolingo but can't follow a podcast in it, I play the guitar badly, I have a blog I hardly ever post on. Regular readers will recall that I occasionally write about set theory but instead of talking sense about it I talk nonsense and make a joke out of it. I actually got a set theory textbook out of the library recently and have been working through it; I'm currently partway through chapter 2 and will let you make your own speculations about how that'll pan out. You get the idea. Perfectionism can lead to perfection, but in my case it typically doesn't. A possible exception is my ability to learn flags, capital cities and other such things that come up in geography trivia games.
The Future
I've got a kind of "If you build it, they will come" attitude towards actually finding interesting things to write about on here. For the moment you should just expect more test posts like this, and you shouldn't expect them regularly at first. The important thing is just getting back in the game, so that when I feel like I've got something interesting to write about, the infrastructure will be in place for me to get it out there.
When I was thinking over some posts I'd written that I was proud of, four that came to mind were this poem, this post about the normativity of logic, this post about a book about ancient Greek philosophy by WKC Guthrie, and this post about collective nouns. So I think poetry, philosophy, and frivolity are the ways to go. I've written about politics in the past too but I don't think I'm very good at it.
I don't often get inspired to write poetry, and while a post like the present one can be dashed off without a great deal of thought, I don't think that's true of poetry, at least not as I write it. Similarly with the two philosophy posts I mentioned: there's no way I could have written those in an hour or two. But frivolity I can probably manage, and probably some less intense philosophy too. I recently had an idea about the Repugnant Conclusion that I could perhaps write a post about. I could also write posts inspired by other people's posts. People sometimes say blogging is dead, but this is obviously bunk. And if the time to write the next instalment comes and I don't have anything interesting to write about, I can just write another one of these. Wish me luck!
Notes
[1] I considered saying a little bit more about it in a footnote to test out the mechanics of footnotes and avoid interrupting the lightness of the main text, but decided to test the mechanics by writing this instead.
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