Writing is hard#

The whole reason that I write a blog is to cope with depression. I do little tech things, and then write about those tech things, and it serves a few purposes.

  1. It’s a kind of journal, only instead of my feelings, I document the things I have learned. A big source of my depression is feeling like I don’t accomplish much. A lot of things in my life haven’t turned out the way that I wanted them to, and having a digital record of my accomplishments helps me to look back and see that I am actually doing things.

  2. It’s a kind of work log/build log. It lets me look back on the things that I have done. I often reference my old blog posts to grab commands and configurations that I need to recall. Now that I am middle aged, I find that it’s harder to remember things. Some of that is evolution: I have started using the Internet as a kind of backup brain. I don’t remember things anymore, I just kind of store pointers to things.

  3. On rare occasions, I connect with people. I don’t know how or why people find my writings, but when they do it’s interesting to see.

Tinkering with platforms is a distraction from actual writing#

For all of its flaws, WordPress did let me write. And, when I was able to wrestle it into letting me use the Classic Editor, it was mostly hassle-free. I don’t know why they hated their classic editor so much?

Now that I have gotten hugo figured out to the point that it is useful for me (as long as I don’t change the dates of blog posts!), the “content redering” workflow is mostly handled. What I need to do now is figure out how to write posts. Hugo is the tool for formatting posts, but the actual creation of posts is still being worked out.

I have been using VSCode to write my MarkDown files. VSCode is a decent development environment, but what I really need a “writing environment”. VSCode is not a word processor, but I am not sure that I need a word processor. The one word processor feature that I miss above all others is spellcheck. I am a fast typist, not an accurate one. My rough drafts are really rough.

The [virtual] writing desk#

The goal of all of this is to be able to write. There is an engineering tendency to tweak every little thing before you feel that you can sit down and actually get to work. Artists on the otherhand, do the opposite. They create with what they have and they learn about the process and workflow along the way. What I want to do is open or log in to my writing environment, write a post, click ‘save’ or ‘puiblish’ and let automation handle the rest. What I don’t want to do is endlessly fiddle with tools and never actually write anything. Hugo was a big improvement on the formatting process, so now I just need to solve the writing problem.

Right now my writing environment is a Windows laptop, with a statically compiled and probably now out of date version of hugo. The whole file structure for my blogs is stored on the local hard drive and I use WinSCP to upload the output files. It has a very 90’s Internet vibe. Nostalgia aside, I prefer to have different computing environments that I like to keep siloed. I do work on my work laptop, and I play games on my gaming laptop. Contrary to what my family may believe, I don’t actually need a dedicated laptop for every single facet of my life.

What I need now is to figure out what the ideal writing environment is for me.

But VSCode has what plants crave!#

For all of my frustrations with Wordpress, it did serve as a kind of virtual writing desk. VSCode is great for writing code, but that is not what I am doing. I think most people that write MarkDown in VSCode spend all of their time writing actual code and not writng documents. I could use a spellcheck plugin for VSCode, but I don’t want to make the same mistake I made with git which was doing what I see everyone else doing and wondering why it sucks.

There are three options that I can see:

  1. Just use SSH and Nano - all through the 90’s and early 2000’s I ran a website from a Unix shell account. It does make for a distraction free writing environment. I could turn up a Linux Container and then use that as my writing environment. It would be super easy to set up, but it doesn’t fix my spellchecking problem.

  2. Spin up some web thing - One option is to find some web-based markdown editor and host it, and hugo, and my mardown files on it. The advantage is that I can put it in one place and connect to it with a browser, Wordpress style. Between the built in spell check in modern browsers, and some kind of browser plug in, I could probably get the “MarkDown Editor with spellcheck” that I am dreaming of. Not as easy as using a Unix shell, but definitely in keeping with my modern web developer aesthetic.

  3. Build a lightweight virtual desktop - The final option is to put all the tools on some kind of Linux container or Docker Container to use as a blogging workstation. I can then use whatever software I want and then build the deployment thing using rsync or whatever. The challenge with a graphical desktop is reliable remote access. For all of my complaining about Windows, remote desktop is incredibly useful. Proxmox does some great things with Spice that I can look into as well.

I don’t actually know how to do anything constructive with a computer#

I have worked with computers professionally for almost 30 years. In that time, writing is pretty much the only work type task I have consistently performed. The rest of the time has been mostly fixing and maintiaining other people’s computers and servers and playing video games. So this foray into self-hosted blogging has brought up a bunch of new things I didn’t know I didn’t know.