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Obligatory "my setup" post; building a writing habit

2020-10-18

It is customary to begin each new blog with a post about the setup of said blog. There is no reason to not follow this tradition here. It is also part of the tradition that the first entry is also the last but let's not follow the tradition blindly.

I became a member of The Republic about a month ago and since then I've been slowly getting familiar with the geminispace and the tools.

From the beginning I fell into the trap of making my setup just right before writing anything. And even though I knew that the setup will be very minimal it still took me some time to do.

I quickly abandoned the idea of doing any automatic processing of text files as done by static website generators. I'm not using one for my website and it would be an overkill here. I'm not planning setting up any "multi-publishing" scheme where I would publish the same stuff here and on the web.

After reading documentation for the Molly Brown server, I decided that the `.mollyhead` files and directory structure is all I need.

Getting into writing

Motivation

I quite enjoy writing (outside of work) but I rarely get a chance to do it. Part of it is that my motivation is not clear. The easiest thing to do would be to start writing in textfiles and not publish it anywhere. I will be writing for myself after all. There is no good reason for my writings to be public.

There is however a part of me that wants to engage with other people. I want there to be a chance that someone reads what I write and maybe even responds. So if local text-files is on one end of the spectrum, the other end would be having a Medium blog that I promote on Twitter. What I need to decide is where on the spectrum I want to land.

I have a website and I tried to write something there but I just don't feel comfortable posting anything more than programming articles there. I don't promote the website in any way but still, the web feels too big.

This is why I got interested in gemini. It's still small enough that I feel like I'm writing for myself but there is a chance to engage with others.

Here is a quote I liked over at `idiomdrottning.org`[a] that describes my feelings well:

... It's nice to have some company! I think
that's what's appealing about smolnet. Company,
as opposed to audience.

At first I was against the idea of creating an Atom feed to be included on CAPCOM but after some consideration I'll give it a shot. I'll try to write a script to generate it for me just from the content of the `text` directory. Could be fun.

Building a habit

I would like to establish a habit of writing. That's why I decided to dedicate at least 30 minutes every day to writing. I will not be too strict about it — if I skip a day or two, so be it. But I'll try to be consistent.

I've listed some topics I would like to write about in the index. I will start writing each peace locally and push it to the capsule once it is in a readable state. Perfection is not important though, writing and publishing is.

If for some reason I don't feel like writing, I will try to at least create an outline of a text. I find it easier to start with a very rough draft and then work on polishing it.

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gemini://idiomdrottning.org/audience-of-one/