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A New Beginning For NAF Musings

My name is Nicholas A. Ferrell. I am a writer, legal research specialist, and WordPress site admin.

You can find most of my work at The New Leaf Journal.

The New Leaf Journal

I included a full assortment of links to my projects and presences in an about page for the instant blog.

About Me

Before I start posting here, I ought to explain what I will be doing.

The History of nafmusings.xyz

I originally purchased the nafmusings.xyz domain name for use with Bear Blog, another terrific small blog platform that has a similar UI to Smol Pub - which powers nafmusings now. I liked Bear Blog, but never found much of a use-case for my blog there, and the monthly price to get SSL encryption for my domain name was not worthwhile to me for a secondary project.

Thus, I dropped the first iteration of nafmusings.xyz and moth-balled the domain.

Discovering Smol Blog

I learned about Smol Blog from Daily Web Things' Daily Pointers.

https://pointers.dailywebthing.com/

The link looked interesting enough when I saw it in my RSS reader. It is a good thing I clicked.

I have had an interest in publishing Gemini content for a while. I briefly started a Gemini blog on another platform but dropped it fairly quickly. The issue is that while I have an interest in publishing some Gemini content, it is unlikely that many readers of my main project, The New Leaf Journal, know what Gemini is or would much care to find out. What made Smol Blog intriguing to me is that it allows me to publish to Gemini (and Gopher) while also having an http version of the project for ordinary readers. I was sold, literally - and put down the $5 to sign up.

For example, having an http version of this project allows me to make it accessible on The New Leaf Journal.

My Around the Web Content Hub

Not bad at all.

Early Impressions

I like Smol Blog thus far. The Gemini syntax is intuitive to me because I an used to drafting all of my content in markdown. The only aspect of gemini formatting that I do not like is how links are handled - but that is a minor quibble. I was also impressed at how easy it was to point my nafmusings domain to Smol Blog. This was, by far, the easiest domain set-up I had the pleasure of completing.

The only thing I wish that Smol Blog had out of the box was a canonocial URL field for the regular HTTP sites. Perhaps this will be a future improvement?

What Will I Post?

I will continue to reserve my full length content for The New Leaf Journal. However, I will use this blog for idle thoughts and musings, shorter versions of some of my original New Leaf Journal content, and some pieces related to technology and creating content online.

Final Thoughts

I look forward to developing this blog as a side-project and publishing some content to (and consuming content from) Gemini and Gopher.

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