Tag: blogging

A return to blogging instead of tweeting

One of the things that I’m trying to accomplish is putting a bit more effort into writing short little missives instead of just dropping storms of tweets. I’m sure it is a function of the wildness that has been occurring recently on that platform. Things are starting to get a lot weirder in general outside in the macro-economy. Seriously, global economic interactions are getting a bit weirder than they used to be in the last 5 years. You would have to zoom way in from that thought to get to the reality of my whining about sending a few tweets. However, that is exactly where you are right now as you read these sentences on the old weblog. Instead of waiting to have larger missives I’m just going ahead and hitting publish on shorter writing sessions. That might increase the volume of blog posts going out, but that is fine. By fine I mean that I find it acceptable and thus the path is set on a go forward basis. 

One alternative I considered for a bit was to just write my tweets as the title of my weblog posts and let the integration push them over to Twitter. That would be an interesting way to go about sharing content on that social network. I do have the WordPress application on my phone and could make that plan a reality. It’s a lot more effort to build out a blog post. It requires categories, keywords, and both a title and body set of content. Those are not blocking factors of course they are just elements that require a little more time to make the plan work on an ongoing basis. It might be a good excuse to set more featured images on short posts. Overall, it is probably a bad plan to try to execute. I’m going to give it a little bit more consideration and you might see a few test posts to see how the practice of actually doing that works for me day to day. 

Most of the time the writing process is about using a keyboard and typing at my desk. Writing on my smartphone just does not work for me based on the tactile interaction and process overall. I did generate a quote for a System76 laptop this weekend. It’s printed out and sitting right next to me as I consider making the move away from my Google Pixelbook to a different type of laptop. The total number of laptops that I have owned in the last two decades is actually not a very large number. I tend to have them until they experience catastrophic failure and are replaced. That is probably the same sort of way other users interact with laptop technology. Nobody really just needs a stack of spare laptops sitting around.  

Just blogging along over here

This is my third weblog post in as many days. You might be ready to call it a streak. Right now I’m on a little vacation from Twitter for the weekend and this has actually increased the amount of time that I would spend writing. I’m spending some of that extra time and focus on trying to figure out where to map out the next set of my writing endeavors. Getting a solid roadmap setup for the next 90 days of writing output will be a really important part of the puzzle. Moving into the new year I’m going to have to refocus on finishing up some AI related content roadmapping for the 3rd year of The Lindahl Letter. I’m really close to sending off the first two years of that content to an editor. I’m hopeful that massive tome of delightful written content ends up distributed in print later this year or potentially early next year in 2023.

This morning my productivity has been pretty good so far. I was able to get a good portion of next week’s Substack post written. Tomorrow I should be able to finish up the draft on that one which will keep me roughly a week ahead of the publishing deadline of every Friday. Recording the audio for the November 18, 2022 podcast was easy enough. I’m still not a big fan of how the Audacity audio editing software changed up the menu’s recently. Within every single podcast editing experience I run a noise reduction transform to remove room noise, a noise gate to remove anything small, and a loudness normalization to help make the listening experience better. Outside of those audio transforms I of course try to edit out any of the major breaths that show up during the recording of raw audio for a podcast.

My weekend routine is really driven by that writing, editing, and recording pattern to meet the drumbeat of that Friday at 17:00 hours publication deadline.

Oh that social media

Maybe it would be a better strategy to just write short blog posts instead of posting to social media. I existed for years without social media and it was fine. Walking to the mall was a thing that happened. People had snacks at the food court. Nobody took any photos of that experience. It just sort of happened. I have a vivid memory of standing in a basement and listening to the album Bleach by Nirvana. We just listened to the music and nobody posted a single thing about it. Things were just different and I’m not entirely sure it was not better. Maybe it is some type of nostalgia or maybe social media is just not all that social these days. At the start of the blogging adventure I read blogs and knew people from their writing. It was different and more personal. Even some meetups happened with people getting together to talk about writing in person. That is probably something that I actually do miss. Getting together with a bunch of writers at some random bar or restaurant probably is something I should have appreciated more at the time. 

This little bit of a post is really just about my thoughts related to shifting back over to engaging in more long form writing and giving up micro blogging. I mean really most of my writing efforts would probably just be 500 word blocks of prose that were created in the moment and published without a whole lot of editing or revision. Literally, I just open a word process document and write for a bit before cutting and pasting that content over to be published out to a weblog. In this case, it gets published out to my weblog. 

https://www.nelslindahl.com/weblog/

You can certainly catch my weblog post feed and it still functions in the same way it always has. The latest post is at the top and you can read on to see what happened before. It has no real continuity between posts or anything that would really make it more connected than it having to be shared in the order in which it was written. Each blog post is effectively followed by another one and that goes on for hundreds of them. Ok that does not really tell the story of it going on for thousands of them spanning decades of content. 

Free up that writing spirit

Recording just completed for week 63 of The Lindahl Letter. I’m still about a month ahead of actual publications at 4 issues loaded and scheduled. I’m still trying to figure out why Substack as a platform did not send out my publication on team time this week. It does not appear to have impacted readership, but I don’t like the unexpected failure. Being on time and having things ready ahead of time is a key part of delivering quality content. 

Yesterday ended up being a little bit of an old school blogging day. Topics were covered as they happened and it was just a list of things and observations. Maybe this current streak of publishing every day is starting to free up a little bit of the old writing spirit from wherever it was being constrained.