20241012

Things progressed yesterday to the point where I both finished up the last lingering draft post for the Lindahl Letter and recorded the podcast audio for it. That resulted in the publication of an actual Substack post for the first time since July. That is a good sign given that posts are supposed to arrive every Friday. I actually had some really good consistency on the publishing front and sustained a 3 year streak of never missing a deadline. That streak however eventually rolled up into a ball of failure and sat in the middle of the room to linger for some time. I’m already busy at work on my next research notes about quantum computing programming languages.

Learning the Ghost platform

All the cool kids have moved from Substack to Ghost these days. The thought of moving from one platform to another for my weekly email newsletter sounded tedious. It seemed like a good idea to go ahead and move my nelsx domain over to Ghost to get things setup in the event I wanted to make the big move. The custom domain process involved setting a CNAME record and an @ record with your host. After that you just have to click a big button within the Ghost admin screens to start the custom domain process. It was not a hard process to achieve. The waiting for the records to update as always was the hardest part of the whole process. It’s a pure mystery of how long it will take the internet to actually update a record. Seriously, the update process just takes however long it does which is generally under 24 hours, but certainly not instant. 

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A backlog without any order

A lot of news stories are picking up the news about Platformer moving off of Substack this weekend. I’m still looking at Ghost and trying to figure out if I just need to watch a couple videos about getting started on that platform. I’ll be really curious to see what happens here in the next 90 days. Yesterday, I shared my 3 year recap of publishing on Substack as both a podcast and a post. Right now I’m looking at the backlog and trying to figure out what order I want to set for the next few posts. I committed to writing my 2024 predictions post, but outside of that I just have over 100 topics in a backlog that are not really in any particular order. 

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All that Substack drama

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been following the drama on Substack and things are starting to become more fluid on that front. It turns out that the Platformer publication is going to leave this weekend and move over to Ghost. I did set up an account on the Ghost platform, but the setup is a lot more complex and involved than what Substack requires. I’m going to have to do some research about how the Ghost platform handles RSS feeds for podcasts as well. More updates will be provided on what I end up deciding. 

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Engaging focus and creativity

At some point this morning, I’m going to work on setting up subscription options for the weblog here. It’s possible at some point (that is rapidly approaching) a lot of people are going to be leaving Substack. I’m 3 years into weekly publishing on Substack with The Lindahl Letter. Separating the weblog into a managed stack of newsletter technology made total sense at the time. We will see how that one plays out probably within the next 30 days. To that end I am going to start getting some things ready just in case [1]. 

We are three days into my latest plan to engage in the act of writing daily in a weblog format. It was a wonderful plan to think deeply about what to do and what to create each day. I’m not directly writing out a stack of 5 big things to work on each day. That list is getting made, but I’m not directly working to blog about it. Instead I’m trying to warm up my writing processes and get things ready to go at the start of the day. That might sound like a productivity hack, but it is something a little bit different. I’m trying to zoom out a little bit and allow my focus and creativity to engage on bigger concepts. 

For the most part I’m considering 2024 to be the great year of code writing. At the end of the year in 2023, I started sharing out more code efforts on GitHub and that will continue moving forward. This upcoming week I’m going to spend some time doing a bit of a code walk on a few Google Colab notebooks. That should be a fun thing to work on this week. It’s entirely possible that videos also get created for a desk tour and my current guitar pedalboard setup. My video output is going to increase. Everything is all set up for recording. Having things set up does not guarantee that video recording will occur, but the right things are in place for that to happen. 

Footnotes:
[1] https://wordpress.com/support/paid-newsletters/

Refocusing on completing objectives

Refocusing on completing objectives should be my primary concern. Part of that will have to be opening the door to doing some of the things that have been a part of my regular routine and mixing in some productivity amplifiers. Probably one of the more productive things that I have done over the years is sitting down and writing at the start of the day to focus my attention on the things that deserve focus and to push away the things that are for later or maybe may never get any really focused attention. Some people might say that is an effort to compartmentalize and ensure focus is on the primary objectives. That sounds about right. 

Making this new plan work will be about writing down potentially in my notebook my five objectives for the day. Each working day has 5 good blocks of time in it to focus on the very real completion of objectives. Letting days go by without knocking out some high quality objectives is something that cannot stand. That is the core reason that refocusing on completing objectives really does have to be my primary daily concern. It’s the nature of not really being able to just fully and openly write that maybe creates my biggest degree of frustration. 

Everyday right now I’m both writing code to drive forward a business purpose and I’m looking for the next great opportunity. Those two things are not really in conflict. Within my 5 good blocks of time (5GBT) I certainly can work on both of those things. Generally, I have elected to spend the first block of the day on the search and then pivoted over to working on other pursuits. Some of that has been working in Overleaf to write academic style articles in LaTeX to publish, other parts of it involves writing Substack content, and the rest involves working on writing code in Microsoft Visual Code Studio or Google Colab. That could very well be broken down into blocks of the day. An example of 5 blocks would potentially look like: 1) Searching, 2) Overleaf article writing, 3) Substack posts, 4) Code development, and 5) Code review. 

Staying locked in and focused on the tasks is always the hardest part of that process. To be fair my best focus happens at the start of the day so whatever takes the last block positions never really gets my best attention. That means that complex troubleshooting or code innovation needs to be repositioned to the front of the block structure when necessary. Outside of that being at the back of the content blocks will generally be ok as some of that just takes time to complete vs. taking pure creativity to get from the desired direction to a working product. 

The things that needed to be said today have been written down and for the most part this is as good as it is going to get today. Welcome to the first Friday morning of 2024. Things are going to keep moving along. That is where we are at right now. Stay focused on the objectives. Always maintain that momentum that moves things forward.