Posts for Writing

• Wednesday, 6 Aug 2025 5:28 pm

  Ghost CMS

  Here are some thoughts about Ghost CMS, written after trying it out for like 10 minutes. I'm writing this down so that I can refer to it later when I'm thinking about moving off CraftCMS for the thousandth time because they haven't implemented dark mode and it hurts my eyes the three times a month I write new blog posts.

  Ghost is focused much more on being a writing platform than a digital garden. My digital garden is to be fair pretty sparse but I like that I can write API handlers to run arbitrary PHP if I want to. And I do.

  That being said, I don’t know that I like it as a writing platform either. The post UI is just WordPress Gutenberg. I don’t dislike that, generally speaking, but there’s something a little… clunky about it. It doesn’t feel snappy. It feels as though there’s a microscopic amount of lag on each keypress. Am I hallucinating it?

  Here's a weird bug on the post UI: I can’t add links. I tried Cmd+K per the hints, but that just focused the search bar, here in Firefox. I wonder if there’s a event.preventDefault() missing somewhere.

  The post UI also aims for tidiness & minimalism, which means that I couldn’t find a toolbar to manually add a link (i.e. with a mouse).

  Everyone wants a newsletter; I just want an RSS feed. I don’t want a list of people’s email addresses. Ghost wants to collect people’s email addresses.

  There’s a Delete button at the bottom of the settings page, where you’d expect it. This only deletes your content, however — not your account. I think I was able to delete my account by visiting Upgrade → Ghost(Pro) → Cancel Account. I say think because after I clicked through the dialog I got the “your account has been deleted email” but the UI timed out and showed me a “Something went wrong” message.

  

  When I refreshed the page, the website seemed to be gone. Okay so that worked out.

  Ghost is for:

  • writers,
  • who don’t use Firefox, and
  • who want a newsletter, and
  • are uncomfortable with Substack’s position on… things

  I don’t think that’s me. Back to checking whether CraftCMS is working on dark mode.
  

  Web Writing

• ---

  Tuesday, 17 Jun 2025 11:42 am

  Blogs not about anything

  I like blogs. I don’t think I’ve written that down before — at least not in public. I suppose I have a lot of opinions that I haven’t written down in public.

  Anyway, I like blogs that are about something, which is fortunate because most blogs are about something. There are a lot of blogs about “rationalism”, for example. These are pretty good, not least because they give numpties like me a handful of talking points that I can bring up in conversation to demonstrate how Clever I am.

  But I’m slowly going off blogs that are about something in favour of blogs that are just journals of regular folks’ idle thoughts. The latest orthodoxy mutates so quickly that I can't keep up, and feels unimportant and consequencelessly culture-war-ey. And I feel increasingly estranged from the only-lightly-filtered daily experience of other people’s lives: maybe this is because writing on the web is micro-optimised to sell me things or make me think a certain way; or maybe this is because I work from home and so opinions aren't buffered by having to face other people's judgment.

  So a blog about e.g. a guy who keeps getting his stuff stolen resonates with me, because it’s not about anything: it’s just the way he feels.

  Writing

• ---

  Thursday, 9 Nov 2023 9:35 pm

  The Pingu

  Here's a wonderful take on Poe's "The Raven", recasting the titular bird with everyone's favourite claymation penguin. There's not a ton to say here except to comment Adam Roberts on the masterful way he retains the musicality and internal rhyme of the original, though he only writes three of the original eighteen stanzas—the first of which is:

  Once upon a night Antarctic, whilst I pondered the cathartic
  Power of many quaint and tragic volumes of forgotten lore —
  While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a clapping,
  As of flippers briskly slapping, slapping on my igloo floor.
  “’Tis some penguin feet,” I muttered, “slapping on my igloo floor —
  Only this and nothing more.”

  Go and, if you can, read it aloud, and see if it doesn't put a smile back on your face.

  Writing

• ---

  Wednesday, 27 Jul 2022 4:55 pm

  Writing about writing

  Lots of writing about writing on the RSS feed, lately! I have written almost nothing over the past month, for reasons that will become clear in a few days when I publish my July monthnotes. In the meantime:

  Jim Nielsen only posts writing that passes a certain threshold for quality:

  So if you’re writing because you want other people to read your writing, some bar can be useful. As King says, writing is refined thinking and hard writing makes for easy reading. Writing is hard for you so that reading can be easy for others.

  While Chris Coyier thinks there's no threshold at all:

  I’d like to write better individual blog posts, but something has always compelled me to punt out a thought early rather than wait until I have some perfect way to present it. And for the record, I don’t mind reading your posts like that either. We’re not shootin’ for the Pulitzer over here mmkay.

  Matthias Ott advocates just putting stuff out there:

  Here is a thought. Maybe, we are overthinking it. Maybe, the one thing we should care most about is just putting stuff out there. At least, this is the primary reason we have a personal website, right? We have it to document and share random thoughts, things we learned, and nuggets we found. If we don’t put stuff out there, why have a website in the first place?

  I like the distinction between writing for yourself and writing for other people. On this website, I'm writing squarely for myself. Anything I could teach you, you could learn better from someone else—but in an ideal world, this website would be one of those fabled Second Brains you hear about from tech influencers on Twitter: comprehensive, indexable, easily written to. I'm probably only like 30% of the way there on any of those—but I'm getting better all the time.

  Writing