Write like nobody is watching

Man, December was a bit rubbish. I got ill. Mixed with a weird couple of months work wise I came into the new year a bit down, deflated and a bit unsure of who or what i was doing.

To ease myself back in I read a few of the many interesting things I see and save for later.
One of these was https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/ - Simon is a prolific writer and doer. One thing he does is have a 'link blog' where he puts interesting links and some thoughts and context from himself. I think it's quite a neat way of encouraging you to think and write about why something was interesting to you, and also share more interesting things.

The other was https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/ where Molly talks about having a better web, and how sometimes we long for how the web was,

Fewer and less intrusive ads, less engagement farming, less surveillance. Fewer paywalls, more "information wants to be free".

when actually we now have tools and abilities to do just that much easier now.

One of the key things from both of these was a bit of a call to action or at least a nudge

You should start a blog. Having your own little corner of the internet is good for the soul!

Over the years I written sporadically and all over the place. I've used Medium, Substack, Linkedin news letters, probably some other things I've forgotten. I never felt like any of it was mine. Newsletters feel weird and pressured, like i've got to have something key to say, even though probably no-one really reads them. Linkedin feels weird for random thoughts. Medium has paywalls. Substack has...issues.

I want, need a place to write, because writing is good for me. But I don't want pressure. So I decided to explore a place for me to just write like no-one is watching.

So i did what anyone would do. I bought a domain name. Tomcw.xyz (my name and then the domain just amused me alphabetically)

Ok, and then what? I'd heard about Ghost a few times but never really looked into it. So I took a dive. And then I went further. As I dug in I started wondering what was possible.

Ghost Pro is a nice and simple way of running a blog. It's got a nice interface and requires zero other knowledge. But I wanted to maybe use this as a place to bring in some of the interesting things I see, and maybe to host a repository of my work.

Interesting things

As I mentioned at the top I keep a collection of interesting things I see. I've done this for a couple of years. But my workflow was clunky. I had an Airtable which stored urls, descriptions and allowed tagging. When on a desktop I'd use the web clipper on Chrome to send stuff directly to Airtable. But when I was on mobile (which is often when I see interesting things) I'd default to emailing myself to then at some point put it into Airtable. And then I'd need to login to Airtable to view these things, and maybe share them. And often I wouldn't share them because, well where should I do this? As I said clunky.

I wondered if while exploring Ghost I could just share these live. I looked at just embedding an Airtable view. It was fine, but not great, and it didn't improve the actual flow really. Fetching and embedding data in Ghost wasn't really feasible on the Ghost Pro cloud.

If in doubt, build it.

So I did what anyone would do. I set up a self hosted* version of Ghost to give me more flexibility. I set this up on Digital Ocean which has a very good 1 click install. It will work out about the same price as the Ghost Pro, and is much more work to manage, but it gives me freedom.

From there I dived into the Ghost documentation and decided to alter a theme so I could fetch and display data from Supabase. Supabase is a postgres database and I use it for a few other things, so it made sense to store my 'interesting things' there.

I then decided I wanted a better way of saving these interesting things. I decided to build a simple app using next.js which allows me to save and edit things in supabase easily. I have the webapp saved on my mobile and desktop, so it's massively reduced the friction of just saving and tagging stuff.

While I was doing that, I also pondered just reusing the workflow to create a live repository of my work. As I said earlier, I kind of felt a bit lost, and was genuinely doubting if I ever did anything. So I started just compiling the things I've done, and even though I've not finished it's already given me a bit of confidence back to say, ah yeah, I do stuff!

So I now have Ghost up and running, some old blogs imported and tagged, and two pages that fetch data from supabase and display in tables which can be searched and filtered by tags. It looks like this. Not perfect, but better than what I had.

So anyway, this is me getting some groove back, spending time on things that interest me (when I really should be doing work!) because I needed it.

And I'm going to keep on writing like nobody is watching or reading, because it's good for me.