About a year ago now, I took down the WordPress install at jaredwsmith.com. It had been there for about 15 years, and chronicled a lot of interesting things particularly from my college years, college years redux, and early career shenanigans (and a real-time account of my gradual fall back into love with meteorology). Then Twitter happened, and the things that I would have usually put at that blog all came spewing out in 140-character (tell me you're old-school Twitter without telling me you're old-school Twitter) chunks, some of which were coherent, and others not so much.
Since then, publishing a personal blog has been a difficult thing for me to maintain. I don't have the time or attention span anymore to maintain a server with a complex piece of software like WordPress for a personal site. Yes, I could pay for hosted WordPress, but I like to tinker with WordPress internals (it's how I make a living) and that is just no good. There's also the intimidation factor of sitting down to a blog post and trying to write. I just feel more comfortable these days in front of a code editor or a "What's happening?" box.
So, about this time last year I decided that I wanted to blog in Markdown using vim (look, I'm not a paragon of rationality 100% of the time), so I rebirthed jaredwsmith.com using Jekyll (my first real foray into anything serious with Ruby) and started publishing it to GitHub Pages as something of a "quarantine project".
I had ambitions to put thoughts out there...and then it just kind of went *poof* as the stark reality of COVID times set in and work, life, what have you became rather stressful. And when I had the mental space and clarity to jot a few thoughts down, it was very unlikely that I'd have been doing it in front of a machine with vim. (Yes, I could shell into a terminal via Prompt on my iPhone and launch vim from there -- perhaps there was a time when I would have found that to be acceptable -- but these days, ain't nobody got time for that.)
So, with the Great Jekyll Experiment looking like a bit of a bust, I once again entertained setting up a personal WordPress instance on a Linode (because, again, I really don't want to have a WordPress site if I can't bend it to my will). But the thought of having another server to patch and maintain sounded about as good as gargling sulfuric acid.
Recently, I've drawn some inspiration from two local (local is Charleston, SC) writers who recently launched newsletters (amazing how those have come back in vogue!). Long-time college and early Twitter friend Geoff Yost curates, in his words, tiny decent things each Friday, and I always come away from his newsletter a little bit smarter or more enlightened. Then there's Jen Ashley, who helmed the CHStoday newsletter for several years before taking the leap into freelancing. She recently started winging it over on Substack. Her sharp wit and wide range on cultural and political topics are another way Fridays are a little more enjoyable these days. These two examples of experimentation in public are awesome -- the vulnerability of trying new things, of putting ideas out there, for some reason, seems so foreign to me nowadays.
Usually when I'm thinking about new publishing opportunities, it's in the context of communicating the weather. But, as a somewhat well-rounded person (the pandemic and ensuing stay-at-home lifestyle has definitely helped round me out in other ways) I wanted to try to position my GitHub Pages blog as a place where I would write about career-related stuff, but to be honest, I've never been good at that nor have I really liked talking about that stuff on a public platform. (There be dragons there, especially in management.) The last thing I wanted to do was fracture my weather platform further -- I am consolidating heavily around the website and having my content originate from servers I own -- and it just seemed wasteful to sign up for Revue or Substack to tinker with it for a couple weeks and get bored.
Then, today, HEY World made its debut. Now this is something I can get behind. It's not Yet Another Account because it's tied with my email. It's very light, very performant. It's got newsletter functionality! And I don't have to expend any energy on the hard stuff and can just write.
We'll see how this goes. I can't promise any predictable recurring interval for writing here, and I honestly have no clue what I will even discuss here -- it could be websites, more weather, or, yes, Power Rangers.
I want to give it an earnest shot, so let's let it rip. Subscribe below with RSS or -- yes -- through an email newsletter. (I won't blow you up.)
Since then, publishing a personal blog has been a difficult thing for me to maintain. I don't have the time or attention span anymore to maintain a server with a complex piece of software like WordPress for a personal site. Yes, I could pay for hosted WordPress, but I like to tinker with WordPress internals (it's how I make a living) and that is just no good. There's also the intimidation factor of sitting down to a blog post and trying to write. I just feel more comfortable these days in front of a code editor or a "What's happening?" box.
So, about this time last year I decided that I wanted to blog in Markdown using vim (look, I'm not a paragon of rationality 100% of the time), so I rebirthed jaredwsmith.com using Jekyll (my first real foray into anything serious with Ruby) and started publishing it to GitHub Pages as something of a "quarantine project".
I had ambitions to put thoughts out there...and then it just kind of went *poof* as the stark reality of COVID times set in and work, life, what have you became rather stressful. And when I had the mental space and clarity to jot a few thoughts down, it was very unlikely that I'd have been doing it in front of a machine with vim. (Yes, I could shell into a terminal via Prompt on my iPhone and launch vim from there -- perhaps there was a time when I would have found that to be acceptable -- but these days, ain't nobody got time for that.)
So, with the Great Jekyll Experiment looking like a bit of a bust, I once again entertained setting up a personal WordPress instance on a Linode (because, again, I really don't want to have a WordPress site if I can't bend it to my will). But the thought of having another server to patch and maintain sounded about as good as gargling sulfuric acid.
Recently, I've drawn some inspiration from two local (local is Charleston, SC) writers who recently launched newsletters (amazing how those have come back in vogue!). Long-time college and early Twitter friend Geoff Yost curates, in his words, tiny decent things each Friday, and I always come away from his newsletter a little bit smarter or more enlightened. Then there's Jen Ashley, who helmed the CHStoday newsletter for several years before taking the leap into freelancing. She recently started winging it over on Substack. Her sharp wit and wide range on cultural and political topics are another way Fridays are a little more enjoyable these days. These two examples of experimentation in public are awesome -- the vulnerability of trying new things, of putting ideas out there, for some reason, seems so foreign to me nowadays.
Usually when I'm thinking about new publishing opportunities, it's in the context of communicating the weather. But, as a somewhat well-rounded person (the pandemic and ensuing stay-at-home lifestyle has definitely helped round me out in other ways) I wanted to try to position my GitHub Pages blog as a place where I would write about career-related stuff, but to be honest, I've never been good at that nor have I really liked talking about that stuff on a public platform. (There be dragons there, especially in management.) The last thing I wanted to do was fracture my weather platform further -- I am consolidating heavily around the website and having my content originate from servers I own -- and it just seemed wasteful to sign up for Revue or Substack to tinker with it for a couple weeks and get bored.
Then, today, HEY World made its debut. Now this is something I can get behind. It's not Yet Another Account because it's tied with my email. It's very light, very performant. It's got newsletter functionality! And I don't have to expend any energy on the hard stuff and can just write.
We'll see how this goes. I can't promise any predictable recurring interval for writing here, and I honestly have no clue what I will even discuss here -- it could be websites, more weather, or, yes, Power Rangers.
I want to give it an earnest shot, so let's let it rip. Subscribe below with RSS or -- yes -- through an email newsletter. (I won't blow you up.)