I’m really not qualified to own and manage a website. 🤷
In attempting to tweak a few things last night I broke everything. The site was down and dead. 💀
I was stuck. I couldn’t fix it. 😬
Enter my pal @Burk. While I slept in my Australian timezone, he worked to fix it in his US one. 🤖
Also enter micro.blog founder and owner @manton. He responded to my help email overnight and also worked on it like the internet greybeard wizard he is. 🧙♂️
I woke up and the site is back. 🔙
Thank you, friends, Jason and Manton. I’m fortunate to be connected to you both. 🙏
It is so long ago, it’s hard to remember why. Was there even a why? I was a nerd interested in technology, and blogs were the hot new thing. There was a cool platform called Movable Type and I wanted to try it out. So I started a blog. This was all a very long time ago.
My blog varies between a diary, an opinion platform, a software review centre and a place to dump thoughts, photos, audio and video. A blog in incredibly versatile!
What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use it?
I use micro.blog and I can’t picture myself moving away from that platform for the foreseeable future, even though my friend Adam is building a cool new thing called Neato, and my friend Vincent has Scribbles. For my purposes, micro.blog is perfect.
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
I’ve used Wordpress, Blot and Movable Type.
How do you write your posts?
However I feel like it. Sometimes I use the micro.blog app. Right now I’m drafting this in Paper. I might use iA Writer or Ulysses or MarsEdit. I might use Drafts. That’s the beauty of Markdown. It doesn’t matter what I use and I can bounce between them freely. I love that.
What’s your favorite post on your blog?
I love all my children the same.
Looking at what my readers like, my Duel of the Defaults post that stemmed from the viral podcast sensation which was Episode 097 of Hemispheric Views is clearly the favourite with 2,464 views over the lifetime of me tracking stats with Tinylytics. That one page accounts for 16.7% of all my website traffic.
Any future plans for the blog?
Nothing really. I haven’t changed anything for quite a while. It’s doing its job and I’m okay with that.
I couldn’t be bothered walking back from the pub where I had dinner.
My 9-year old is asking how consoles work. This is testing my ability to teach computing hardware principles based on my knowledge that was established 30 years ago. Do I still talk CPU, GPU, RAM/ROM? HDD v SSD?
This is the only “guys having a chat” podcast in my feed. I really enjoy the dynamic of these guys and the community they’ve built around them. Recommend: The Battle of the Defaults and the App Defaults craze it created is a great place to start.
Norwegians are the best. Listeners of Hemispheric Views will already know of the esteem in which I hold fürstenberg; who is essentially Norwegian me. We have many similarities across our respective histories; it’s quite fun!
Now, I’ve got another Norwegian to thank: Erland. I discovered Erland through Mastodon, I think. Although he also has a micro.blog site, so it could have been there. Like myself, Erland also seems to have an interest in notetaking apps, and his favourite is Paper. He wrote a wonderful review of it.
I’ve looked at Paper in the past, but the sheer cost of the app prevented me from trying it. I have so many Markdown notetaking apps, I simply couldn’t justify buying another, no matter how nice it may be.
Now, though, thanks to the kindness of Erland from Norway, I am typing this blog post in Paper, as a way of testing. I’m using the Mac app now, but I also have the iOS version. How? Erland provided me with codes for the apps! This came about as we had a little discussion on Mastodon (still my favourite social network) about our notetaking app preferences. Typewriter mode was one such nicety, and I see that Paper offers that very feature. I have enabled it now, and it is very lovely—especially the slightly delayed scroll on each carriage return.
This blog post is the first thing I’ve written in Paper. I’m about to go back and add links and stuff. I’m using my new MacBook Pro which is lovely, but I haven’t yet installed Brett Terpstra’s SearchLink tool to automate link insertion, so we will see how Paper handles this next process.
The takeaway from this blog post? Firstly, Paper is a new app I’m trying. The main point though? Norwegians are great! I must visit sometime.
