Weblog

Considering advertisements and prompts

This week I tried enabling ads on the weblog and it turns out I just don’t like the placement. Apparently, the advertisements when enabled show up above or below and are very large. Right now I’m not willing to leave those running on the old weblog. They have been turned off, but maybe I’ll do some testing on them again later this year. Based on volume it is not a big deal to turn them off or on for that matter. Right now that type of monetization scheme is not material to this effort to engage in daily weblog writing. For the last few days at the start of the day I have been sitting down to actively write. It’s a pure stream of consciousness exercise at this point. It may have some direct aim at writing about things that are happening, but that is not a disruptive guide to creating content at this point. 

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The subscription system is now running

Yesterday, I was able to complete my first subscription based post here on the old weblog. It took me a few minutes to learn how to insert the first paywall blocker widget. I’m not ready to engage in the active process of daily writing and publishing within the weblog. I’ll make sure the opening paragraph is always ready to be visible and that the rest goes a bit deeper after the paywall. It’s a strange thing to consider, but I figure that this could be interesting if the newsletter had to move over to the weblog. Right now it looks like Substack might be making some changes and could keep existing throughout 2024. A lot of turbulence has occurred and that makes me wonder if people might jump to some alternative if one presents itself. Now would be the time for a great online writer migration. 

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Testing the subscription model

Yesterday, I was able to get a subscription model setup on the weblog. I’m not entirely sure the weblog subscription market will ever end up being like the Substack market. Some market advantage exists for Substack as a marketplace of readers interested in independent writing. You see people who subscribe to a few different writers and that amplification effect helps build wider audiences for some writers. Certainly, some writers have audiences that are bigger than any one platform and they can go just about anywhere and be successful. Somebody in that category might very well be able to run a WordPress newsletter with a subscription model. They would have to make sure it is always up and running. Consistency and stability would be a necessary part of keeping that system running in the long term.

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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/

Keyboards keep getting better

I’m still rocking the Corsair K65 RGB 60% size mechanical gaming keyboard as my primary daily driver. Using it does require in my opinion a Kensington duo gel keyboard wrist rest or some other type of ergonomic wrist riser. For me the keyboard needs to be about an inch in front of the wrist rest and I can type throughout the day without any problems. Earlier today I spent some time writing and thinking about how to best move forward. Certainly the keyboard helped deliver those thoughts from ideation to fill in the blank page. 

I’m striving to spend some time writing a blog post every day and thinking about what things deserve my time. A bit of writing each day is a great way to actively engage in thinking. Over the last couple of decades I have found that the act of writing for a long period of time is enough to really help me think deeply about something. From time to time a pure type of stream of consciousness can be productive while it does open the door to some extremely useless prose generation. Imagine a lot of derivative writing about the nature of writing. Certainly, that is something that does not really have to be imagined. It exists everywhere. 

I think 2024 will be the year that the internet fundamentally changes. We may see a shift in the way internet usage is occurring. We may very well interact and make requests differently going forward. We are going to see a lot of disruptive technology landing this year. We may look back at this next year as the year of big pivots in base technology.

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.