Blogging Again

I'm going to start blogging again after a long hiatus. Expect to see more content here soon!

It's been way too long since I wrote anything of substance in a blogging format. I recently realized that one of the reasons that I hadn't done so was because I wasn't very proud of the way my blog at my personal domain looked. So I decided to put in the time to redo things.

I've created a content system that uses MDX for posts, and is almost like a headless CMS that lives in a Git repository. The source for the site is available via GitHub, for anyone that is curious of how things are put together.

I used a theme from Tailwind Plus as a starting point, and then slightly customized it to my liking. I'm pretty happy with how things turned out. I've got several of the sections that the template ships with disabled for now. I'll get those turned on in the future, but I wanted to go ahead and launch with at least the basic blog functionality.

I eventually plan on setting up cross-posting to other platforms via POSSE Party, a platform built by Justin Searls that makes it easy to syndicate content to multiple platforms. I'm looking forward to feeling like I own my content again.

I've imported my old posts from Tumblr, so if you go back far enough in the archives, you'll see content that dates back to 2011. I'm not sure how many people will find value in that old content, but I wanted to preserve it for posterity.

I want to add a syndication feature for more short-form content, the kind of things that would have gone into a Tweet or a Mastodon post. When I do, I'm going to import my old Tweets and Mastodon posts here as well. That way, everything will be in one place, and it will all feel like it's under my control.

I'm not sure how I'm going to handle post comments from those platforms yet. That is something that I eventually want to handle. The site doesn't support comments in its current form, and I like the idea of keeping it as a completely static website. Perhaps I can add comment support via an API that I build. Comment syndication would be an interesting challenge to tackle at that time.

For now, if you want to respond to something that I written, then please write your own blog post in response, and link back to my post. Or you can reach out to me on Mastodon at @mscottford@toot.legacycode.rocks.

I want to give a big shout out to Andrea Goulet. She took me on as a coaching client towards the end of last year, and one of the things that she's been helping me with is getting my ideas out into the world. Blogging again is just the first step on that journey. What you're reading now would not have been possible without the encouragement and support that Andrea has provided me. (Disclosure: Andrea is also my wife. She has been pretending like I'm not when she's coaching me, though.) I'm really getting a lot out of the coaching practice that she's set up. The cohort that I'm a member of is starting to gel, and it's been nice to get to know other folks that are on similar journeys.