Right now the weblog has posts visible from 2021 forward. I have been slowly moving the posts from private to public a few each day to avoid the newsletter setting kicking off emails. I’m thinking that I’m going to get the posts from 2020 loaded and then take a little break from moving the posts to public from private until I can do it systemically. Sometimes WordPress is great to use and sometimes it is very frustrating. I totally get why people build plugins to accomplish specific tasks. This is an example where I could probably create a custom plugin to do this one weird edge case that I want to accomplish. My guess is very few people move all the posts to private and then want to move them back to public. I might look for a post that suppresses the notifications on posts from both the Jetpack social media and the site email newsletter notification options.
I have been really invested this year in making daily posts and just updating the weblog implementation. A lot of little design tweeks have happened. Things have been tested out in different operating systems and display sizes. The process of learning how to modify the WordPress Twenty Twenty-Five theme has been really interesting. I’ll be curious if they just end up folding the theme into the core deployment and stop releasing a yearly theme now that they have a pretty solid method to just release WordPress. Maybe this will be the last year named theme and they will just release product updates with a noted default theme. It’s also possible that this will be the last theme they release because the whole project is becoming chaotic and really dramatic. My news feed powered by Google insights has been delivering me all sorts of WordPress related drama over the last 3 months. It’s like a reality television show or would be a good basis for a spin off season of the television show Silicon Valley where Dinesh and Gilfoyle get really into open source contributions and create drama and hijinks.
Part of the early morning writing process is about getting my mind to relax into a pure stream of consciousness type of writing mode. It’s really about that moment where nothing else is under consideration and the process of writing becomes wholesale in focus. It’s moments like that where the written word could go anywhere that are the most interesting to me and my thought process. Part of that is just moving beyond any type of writing backlog or planned trajectory for creating the written word and just focusing on the things that come to the forefront of consideration in the moment. I know that some of that is about where the sparks of creativity are going to be kindled and that passion drives production. Sometimes during that very first hour of the day the sparks of creativity are still sleeping and you end up just going wherever things are going to end up going and that is the part of the process I find absolutely interesting.
Previously a lot of my writing at that moment of pure stream of consciousness ends up getting pretty philosophical and reflective. I end up focusing deeply on how normative processes fulfill expectations within civil society and the aggregate considerations that are placed on communities of place, circumstance, and values. A lot of my writing, if given enough time to breathe and really focus would end up opening the door from that foundation to evaluating the intersection of technology and modernity. From social norms and considerations of civility to how technology changes society in the aggregate are really at the foundation of the things that I end up thinking deeply about given enough time to really relax and write deeply about a subject.
That does not end up being the type of writing that gets reworked until it is the absolutely best possible version. I tend to take another approach where I just rewrite that passage until the final version is self evident. My more academic writing gets reworked in place and that is a part of the editing and refinement process of that type of work. The more stream of consciousness type evaluation of thought and prose is something where rework is not possible and you just sort of take a run at it and the outcome of that process is the outcome. My general writing corpus is full of examples of that in terms of millions of words being written. All of those words are organically generated and really just a product of my daily writing routine.
Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado