I really enjoyed Meeting Mr. Kid Pix by jeffrey aka Whistlegraph on Twitter. I appreciated the sincerity of both him and Craig Hickman. So nice to see people putting effort to understand + be understood.
This does touch on something I've tried to nail down before in regard to creative tools and video games.
It would be cool to make using the garden a fullscreen terminal experience. Fzf menu is already pretty close, maybe I just need like an ASCII art welcome message, and I should clear terminal history on menu open.
I have the fzf menu working now. It looks like this:
Screenshot of my fzf garden menu
I added month section subheaders to the main page and changed the timestamp display. I think I am mostly happy with it though I'm a bit concerned I'm getting too fiddly.
I was writing a lot and then I decided I needed to redo the blog and then I thought I can't write more until I finish redoing the blog and so I wasn't writing.
So I pushed this version. It's more like Twitter, with individual entries and also the ability to thread. There are some unaswered questions (like pagination). I also can't decide if I should move all my feed posts in here. They might overwhelm the writing posts, but I think I'd like to figure out a way everything can live together.
I changed from bash scripts to typescript scripts, which has been helpful for organization. It's going well but I can also feel it in danger of sprawling out of what I can hold in my head -- and I feel like that is dangerous for solo projects, it's where it starts getting harder to jump back in and tinker. I should think about consolidating and carving up the pieces to make it easier to work on pieces at a time without feeling the stress that the whole thing might break.
After Dark Mowing Man From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nfQnJ9EsCw
Editing this on the train. It would be good to have more posts to test with.
I should probably move in the garden posts.
Seeing the OG images I generate for this blog has me thinking. If you split a blog post by paragraphs and generated PNGs, and then you stitched those into a GIF with the frame time based on text length... that would maybe be a portable / embeddable blog post? Not good for accessibility and not to replace the post, but maybe an interesting derivative.
This site is a bash build script that concats HTML together. I also put together a little start script using fzf that has some common task options new_post / build / commit. I really like the feel of the starting bash script - it makes it feel like writing in this blog is its own little dedicated computer program.
The source for this one is viewable on github.
I think I'm going to try a new blog concept (a continuation of the thread-focused blog idea), that combines what I do on feed.
Thinking about things that make you see the world around you differently: ARGs, birding, mushroom hunting, simulating physical phenomena in code, drawing.
I was listening to the Egglant podcast interview with the Animal Well maker and they mentioned "secrets in plain sight" in the game and compared it to ARGs, where your street becomes something new/different to you because there is a geocache (or pokemon station there).
That made me think about a tweet I saw yesterday from Jer Thorp about how birding helps you to see more details around you. Someone else mentioned taking up mushroom hunting had a similar effect.
What if I made a blog like this blog but also more like Twitter. Where I could make little posts, or I could also reply to old posts, bumping that 'thread' of posts to the top. But (like Twitter) it would show the update, with an indication and ability to click through to see the full thread.
That seems kind of cool? Like it'd be good for long-running thoughts I keep returning to and also for WIP posts...
Maybe structuring stuff in the code gets weird, but it's going to be small-scale so I think I could figure something out. I think I'd just do markdown files with like a link at the top, and use the filename for the date slug like I've been doing. I would still like titles I think. But maybe that's just otional.
I would say this garden has been a relative success in terms of helping me write more. I kind of want to combine it with my feed, and maybe my homepage?
Feed would be the thing to do first I think. It's interesting trying to categorize the differences between posts. Garden is more writing based. Feed is structured around an image. Feed was designed to make sure I wasn't blocked trying to think of a title, that I could do more work-in-progress stuff. Maybe that's different now that garden is here.
Overall I want to keep things simple. But I also want to have some fun. I'm pretty confindent I can figure out ways to do what I want, and as long as I keep the file format relatively stable, markdown for garden and a common structure for feed, I think I can do it without really risking anything.
