Oops, missed September

Current status:

• ~500 unreads in my RSS feed (and that’s after some aggressive scanning and running through some of the higher-volume-but-lighter-weight stuff).
• ~100 open tabs of stuff to either finish reading, share, or process in some way.
• Inbox is read but I’ve got a handful of messages to still respond to (apologies if you’re waiting).
  • Been terrible at keeping in touch in general, so you could apply that statement to various messaging services as well.
• Completely missed posting anything in September, despite plenty of desire and even some thoughts to share.

Lots of excuses: I flew out to a conference at the end of August, but promptly got sick the first day of the event and missed it; we bought a house and that’s been a steady supply of tasks; the work project I spent the last 10+ months on finally released and the month leading up to launch was kinda crunch-y; we adopted another dog and have been getting her acclimated… the list goes on. After the flurry of stuff the past two or three months plus the year of traveling, it feels like I haven’t had a chance to catch my breath in a while and I’m fucking tired.

Some quick thoughts:

• I’ve been pondering looking at other blogging options, possibly rolling something up with a platform like Astro or similar. It’s no diss on WordPress, but it doesn’t hurt to experiment. It might give a nice opportunity to try out different layouts and patterns and ways of approaching the site beyond the traditional “blog” experience (maybe start thinking more of the garden concept). I’ve got a few underutilized domains sitting around, so I’ll probably experiment there rather than muck with this blog directly (for now). My actual blogging/writing needs are pretty simple: a spot where I can write without it feeling like a chore; working RSS feed support; maybe some improved media handling. Everything else is gravy.
• One of my favorite online communities (the Slack associated with the XOXO festival) is going read-only soon, as the conference has officially run its course, and there’s sort of a scramble within the community to find a solution folks can migrate to. As I mentioned before, I don’t have a particular desire to run a forum or online space again, but the conversation has still piqued my interest and left me curious about what the options are these days, especially if you want something open source.
  • A few I’ve noticed while looking around is setting up an XMPP server, or a Matrix server, or a Rocket.Chat server, or a Mattermost server, or a Discourse server.
  • They all seem like kind of a pain in the ass in different ways. I think the ones I’d be most interested in experimenting with personally would be either Matrix or Discourse (and yes, I know Matrix is technically a protocol, but I don’t really care whether it’s Synapse or Conduit or whatever). I think it’s kind of neat that Discourse is primarily forum software, but they’ve implemented what looks like a fairly robust chat system on top of it, so you get a hybrid chat+forum experience.
• Thinking about my relationship with information in general, and how to better organize both what I write and what I read and want to save. Sort of a perennial topic if I’m honest, but I’m getting that itch again. This blog is still too high friction to be a scratch notebook, but as a step past that it might still fill a purpose. Pondering giving a genuine go at using Obsidian for that lower level scratch role.

Tired, a little fried from the pace of things lately, but hopeful that this fall and winter will strike a better balance. Hope you’re all doing alright as well, and that this fall turns out to be slow in all the best ways.