writing

From the birdwatching colophon:

Posts are written in Markdown because writing requires restraint.

I added some new pages to the site recently, including a colophon. I’m pretty sure the first time I ever saw the word “colophon” was the one on Daring Fireball. His is a lot shorter than mine.

Admittedly, I wrote a colophon to be like all the other cool kids, but I’ve always loved the concept and am excited to have one of my own.

The quote from my colophon above is one of the core ideas of this blog. Constraints can be a good thing.

One of the things I’d say I loved now, but hated at the time, was my university newspaper’s hard print deadline. If I didn’t have the files on the FTP server by 5pm, there simply would not be an issue. Plenty of mistakes are more forgivable than not printing. To work at the paper was, more than anything, to work for the stress of that deadline.

When I graduated college, I fully expected I’d land in a newsroom somewhere where the always-on, deadline-driven kind of work never ceased. The corporate marketing job I landed instead still had deadlines, but they might be weeks or even months away. When I have too much time to work on an idea, it doesn’t become richer, and more defined. It languishes, rotting in my drafts folder before it ever gets the chance to actually be flawed. Ze Frank called this “brain crack.”

The reason my college paper’s deadline was effective for me is because it was externally imposed and had real consequences. Writing for myself is neither. But with this blog I do have two key constraints I’m willingly adopting:

Constraint 1: I can’t host the blog (and allow hosting it to become its own hobby)

Constraint 2: I should only write in Markdown.

Markdown is a famously opinionated plain text alternative to rich text markup. Earlier this year, Anil Dash wrote about how Markdown took over the world. He and Markdown’s creator, John Gruber, were also on The Vergecast to discuss some of Markdown’s history.

I love Markdown and have been using it more and more since I first tried Bear.app in 2017, though now I mainly use Drafts (for writing) and Obsidian (for knowledge keeping and organized notes). Gruber’s original version doesn’t have all the same functions as other “flavors” of Markdown (such as the version GitHub uses, or the CommonMark spec), but they all have a common goal: the text you type with a standard keyboard should more or less resemble the formatting it would render.

Markdown doesn’t reliably solve for every type of common text formatting (hence the opinionated-ness). Notably, most “flavors” of Markdown don’t even have a standard way to underline text. Other things like tables, LaTeX and certain kinds of images and embeds vary in compatibility, but still aren’t that easy to do by hand. These range from difficult to type/scaffold on your own or are highly specific to certain flavors.

Ultimately, this is the key tradeoff of the format, and to me it’s a feature. I don’t think this blog needs all of those formatting options anyways. My intention is to limit formatting in posts to “standard” Markdown. Some non-post page content may break this rule sparingly.

My colophon states that my goal is to write at least twice a week. A pretty low bar if I count short/micro posts. I’d really wanted to commit to at least do 300+ words in a fuller post like this one with some regularity but I intentionally didn’t. I’m still easing back into writing and I wanted to set the bar low enough that I will always be able to clear it. At some point, hopefully, I’ll have done this for so long I can’t stop. I’ll raise it then, and no earlier.

Setting big, lofty goals is one of my biggest personal failure modes. So this time, I set a small one.

Writing requires restraint. Every kind.

Simon Willison recently reshared some advice he gave in an interview:

My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all.

The number one reason I’ve not published more on my blog was that I kept thinking it still needed something. Moving to Micro.blog is in large part a way for me to lower my own bar, and write more on my blog and less just on social media.

Last week I was talking to my friend Josh about blogging and our conversation was self-inspiring enough that I decided to set up another blog.

Well, now my new blog is my old blog too. For the past few years, I’d been occasionally posting at b10g.xyz using a multiple blog platforms hosted on various cloud services over a span of four years. The version I retired last week was hosted on Cloudflare Pages with a site statically generated using Lume from Markdown files I kept in a private GitHub repo. Over the blog’s life, I’d also used Astro and Next.js on Vercel, hosted the current version for a bit on Deno Deploy, and briefly experimented with Emdash. This final version was what worked the best for me. Moving isn’t an indictment of Lume, Cloudflare, or even using Markdown in Git as a CMS. All of those things are great, except maybe the last one, and I still recommend them wholeheartedly. Just not for me.

I originally wasn’t planning to migrate, because that felt like “fixing” something that wasn’t exactly broken. But something was broken. Even though I’d published more blog posts in the last year than I had in a while, I’d come to realize that my self-managed setup lacked restraint. Any feature or tweak I wanted to add, I could. And with the help of AI agents, I often did. What I ended up with was more than enough to validate my desire to write, but I wasn’t publishing all the things I wanted to write because managing what I’d built took more of the time. I still have drafts in my Notes.app that never saw the light of day because actually publishing involved sitting down at the right machine and doing a few manual steps that I couldn’t easily do on mobile.

I’ve learned too late in my writing journey that wrangling your workflow can will drain your capacity for writing and creating if you let it. I really enjoy building platforms. It’s my day job. But I want writing to be joy, not more work. Micro.blog as a platform is exactly what I want. It’s available anywhere, it helps me syndicate to my various social accounts, it has no ads or built-in analytics, but most importantly… it has constraints I can’t change. I’m so excited I signed up for an annual subscription.

Building was fun, but I think writing will be even more fun.

Josh Gammon:

The industries built to help facilitate third spaces in our communities keep getting bought out and shut down. When I think about my stint at Blockbuster during college, I like to joke that I was one of the last employees. It’s not not true. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and I was working at one of Tulsa’s last remaining stores until it closed sometime in 2011.

Josh and I have been friends since high school and I remember occasionally going to visit him at his Blockbuster before it closed. Even before they announced its closing, the store felt like a relative everyone expected to die soon but wasn’t comfortable discussing. His store finally closed in April 2011 on the same day as half of the 21 stores in the Tulsa metro area, including the one in Broken Arrow I always went to as a kid. I was sad, but I hadn’t rented anything from a Blockbuster it probably 4 or 5 years.

It’s easy to look back and say Blockbuster should have innovated, and in my MBA program that’s exactly what my textbooks and professors said. They thought Blockbuster should have merged with someone bigger. Or they should get rid of late fees, or offer DVDs by mail, or do monthly subscriptions, or kiosks, or streaming. But Blockbuster actually did every single one of these. The reality is that they did these badly and too-late. Blockbuster did not die of a failure of imagination or even a failure to implement new ideas. Blockbuster died because consumer tastes were changing faster than they could.

(This post was originally on codybrom.micro.blog before I migrated b10g.xyz to micro.blog)

In the middle decades of my life so far, sometimes I’d become so feckless that I’d yearn to bedrudge my innermost angst in some kind of ruled book for notes. Each time I performed this ritual, and I must confess it was many times, I’d say to myself, “Aha! This office supplies purchase will surely cure my writer’s block.” Dear reader, it did not.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped buying new journals and notebooks. Not because I didn’t want to, but simply because it became too depressing to look at how wasteful it had become. I expect the good people at Field Notes in particular enjoyed some lavish parties at my expense.

But weirdly, I’ve never held any contempt for any of the blogs I’ve started and abandoned. My Xanga, then the blogs feature of MySpace, various iterations of self-hosted “tumble”-logs, Tumblr (obvs), multiple Wordpress sites and even now, as I write this, I technically already have a blog. The problem with my newest one is I almost never write for it because that requires me to commit MarkDown files to a GitHub repo, something I can’t do comfortably from most places. But that was the issue I had with the others as well. They were always a very specific place that was harder to write to anytime, and often required needlessly more formality to post than not.

I thought it was easier to buy a new journal than to deal with the sense of failure I felt about the last one. I suppose this post is also mostly journaling, and not “blogging” though I think I forget what the distinction is (if there ever was one).

Maybe this platform subscription will finally cure my writer’s block.

If you interacted with my last LinkedIn post, I owe you an apology. It was 100% AI slop.

This post isn’t, but here’s why I did it.