Somewhat inspired by other colophons and in particular Arron Davis.

The Blog

This blog run on WordPress using the indieweb friendly SemPress theme. I use a child theme to allow me to make mistakes. I host with blacknight.co.uk. Originally because it used macs and allowed me to play with Flamethrower, a cgi engine based on SuperCard. I’ve had a great service over the years.

This blog has been through a few changes and a couple of urls.

I’ve been using IndieWeb principles in a haphazard way for around 10 years now. Currently most of my posts cross post to mastodon and Bluesky. This via micro.blog, Micro.blog is a marvel. The way I use it cost nothing. If I was starting from scratch I’d be very tempted to go all in on micro.blog. It is designed to allow easy exit to other services which is pretty unique.

For most of my IndieWeb life I used the post kinds plugin by David Shanksie, I am now also use Indie blocks by Jan. I wish I could understand how these work together. I hardly ever use replies now, mostly replying on the original blog or mastodon.

I pull back comments & like from mastodon & Bluesky using brid.gy. I like the idea of using the activity pub plugin to make my blog my mastodon account but have done nothing on that front.

Writing/Typing

I tend to start writing in a text editor, TextMate on Mac or Drafts on iOS. I am all in on apple apart from some Raspberry PIs. I used to blog fairly exclusively through TextMate’s blogging bundle, now I copy paste and edit in WordPress more. The TextMate blogging bundle does not support IndieWeb extensions or the block editor style posts. It still works producing a classic block.

When I used the blogging bundle exclusively I had all my posts in one folder. Now I use drafts in a disorganised way, but depend on backing up my database and files regularly.

I do regularly experiment with different ways of posting. In my class blog and glow work I nearly always use the block editor although I still start some posts in TextMate.

I’ve been testing WordLand, Dave Winer’s simplified interface for WordPress recently. This has revived my interest in other ways of posting, playing with AppleScript and trying to get Claude.ai to make me a block friendly, rest api way of posting to WordPress like the blogging bundle does. I got quite far with Sublime Edit, but I’ve not paid for that. It also didn’t handle images with TextMate’s elegance.

Images

Graphics, my unhappiness at the demise of Fireworks persists. I use Acorn now and really like it, but miss Fireworks wonderful interface for creating gifs. I do some repetitive tasks with imagemagick often combined with AppleScript. I try to crush images with image optim & Acorn (is great for pngs imo).