I had my first blog in 2007, almost 20 years ago. Since then, I always „owned" a blog but didn’t necessarily update it regularly.
Over the years, URLs changed (I remember four), focus changed (travel, photo, personal), technology changed (Wordpress, Ghost, Jekyll, Hugo), …
This blog is online since 2019. In 2020, when I had lots of free weekends, I created the first theme myself. Before that, I was always using themes developed by others.
This blog is based on Hugo and comes with built-in tags. It even provides a page with a list of all tags used on this blog. Mine is not very polished, because I barely used it.
One of the reasons is me having a hard time coming up - not to speak of sticking with - a taxonomy. If I am being honest, I just type some random tags in the front matter when I start writing a new post.
Last year, we all shared our default apps. Robb compiled a list of all responses. Thank you. This helped a lot.
Today, roughly seven months later, I wanted to give an update. What apps did I exchange and why?
📨 Mail Client: Mail.app This hasn’t changed. I am happy with Apples build in mail app, although it could get a facelift and a new feature or two. However, not the ones promoted by Apple on this years keynote.
Manuel Moreale wrote a helpful article for everyone thinking about starting a blog. He identified two issues soon-to-be-bloggers have:
not knowing what to write about, and worrying that nobody will read it For the first issue, I suggest to read either this article by Manuel, this one by Meadow, or this one by alienlebarge. All three offer inspirations on what to write about and to not overthink it.
Concerning the second issue, Manuel offers to be your first reader.
In 2019 I wrote an article about the technical background of this blog, and in 2020 there was a post about how I blogged using iPad. Neither of these articles mentioned the complete workflow, starting by how I capture ideas and how they slowly form into larger articles.
The idea of this post is to give this comprehensive overview. Not for you to replicate it, because it is so cool & smooth, but for me to see how things change over time.
Although quite late in the year, I did some spring cleaning on this blog today. Using the „default apps 2023“ as an opportunity, I finally took the time to implement some changes that were on the todo list for quite some time.
Comments are finally gone. I used as self hosted version of „isso“ but found myself not updating the software in several years. Additionally, forcing users to leave personal data (name and email) on this site just to get in touch didn’t feel much GDPR‘ly.
I stumbled upon this by reading Kev’s great blog but it seems there are a bunch of people currently sharing their default apps.
For me, always looking for a new app to improve my workflow, this is great. However, I had to notice that many people - like myself - stick with the default apps of their operating system. But, I will scroll through most of the other contributions to check if there is something to try out for me.
Unfortunately, ideas for new blog posts often fizzle out because I find it too much of an effort to boot up my laptop in the evening and organize my thoughts. I am therefore always on the lookout for ways to lower the inhibition threshold as much as possible.
A good approach would be to remove the laptop from the equation and blog from a device that I have in my hand all the time anyway: Smartphone or tablet, for example.
Vorgeschichte Vor gar nicht allzu langer Zeit bin ich mit diesem Blog von Ghost zu Jekyll gewechselt. Ghost hat mir eigentlich sehr gut getaugt, auch wenn ich nicht der größte Fan davon war, dass bloggen mit Markdown mit den neueren Versionen einen Klick weiter entfernt war. Außerdem war es für mich immer eine kleine Herausforderung bei neuen Versionen die Abhängigkeiten auf dem Betriebssystem auf dem neusten Stand zu halten und die Datenbank zu migrieren.
