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Reduce the friction

Posted Tue 07 Sep, 2021.

Recently I've been adding more RPG related blogs to my feed reader, trying to catch up with whatever is going on in "the hobby", specially related to OSR (although I'm not completely sure what that label means now).

The thing is that I found an excellent blog titled "Take On Rules" by Jeremy Fiesen that has a recurrent post titled "Amplifying the Blogosphere", where the author "co-mingles inspiration from, gratitude for, and sharing of other blog posts". I found these very interesting, but what called my attention -and that's where this post is going, I promise- is this:

I decided to rewrite it [a script to stub out new blog posts] as a Emacs function. This interactive function, named tor-post-new, prompts for the posts title. I fill out the title, and the function create the file with the appropriate Hugo front matter and opens that file in a buffer.

Moreover Fiesen uses "elfeed" feed reader in Emacs, and he had written a function that will help him to write those excellent "Amplifying the Blogosphere" posts by getting quotes from the feed reader itself:

Further Molding Emacs to Reinforce Habits

And I think that is brilliant!

I'm not writing here as often as I initially had planned, and I'm not writing that much in my web blog neither; and I know why is that (because I've been back to old habits and still use Twitter, to some capacity at least), but there are some steps in publishing an new text here that, after a while, had started to be a bit of a pain:

Copy the latest post as template, the new name follows the pattern: YYYYMMDD-slug-text.
Edit it and change everything: title, the date, and the post body.
Edit the gemlog index and add the new entry to the list (copy the filename, add the date, copy the title).
Run the script that was generates the Atom feed. This is part of a script that does an rsync to my server.

Is that much? Well, I didn't think so but turns out *it is*. So I wrote a simple script that given a title it will pre-populate the idem, date and just leave everything ready to start writing the post itself.

On top of that I rewrote the script to deal with the Atom feed and it will now also generate the index file for the gemlog, simplifying things quite a lot.

To be fully honest, I don't know if this will make me write more, but at least I have reduced the friction, and as Frisen suggests, this could help me reinforce habits.

Which takes me to the next point: I'm not completely happy how I have been consuming feeds in Gemini. It was alright with Lagrange -despite a few little issues-, but then I may occasionally use my phone, so I don't have those feeds -besides, Ariane 4 beta is not there yet-. So all together, I think I have failed to do feeds properly. Which is OK, time to have a think and start over.

I like how some people make their feed readers more like the idea of a "planet", so common in blogs back in the early-mid 2000s, with a page in their capsules that aggregate all the posts of the capsules they follow. However, I'm also thinking that I would love to have some functionality similar to what "Take On Rules" has, because that links nicely with the way gemlogs deal with conversation (make a RE: post in your gemlog).

(and then, tracking who is replying to my posts? This is starting to sound a bit like Twitter... or Tumblr?)

Anyway, I'm still undecided. To be continued!

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