Matthew Lang

With the basics of my blog now in place, I can focus on other parts of the blog that I would like to build.

I've been writing notes for an aggregator of sorts that would subscribe to content streams. These content streams can then be shown on my blog. RSS would be the initial type of stream that I would offer as these are open and simple to integrate into the blog. Other types of content streams may follow if I decided to incorporate them into my blog. This aggregator will then be displayed on its own page or on my blog's sidebar if I choose to put it there.

One of the great blogging platforms that I miss the most is Posterous. The idea of this blogging platform was simple yet highly effective. Instead of writing your posts in a password-protected section of your blog, you write your posts with email and mail them to your blog. Starting small by being able to email posts without titles would be a good start. Posts with titles and attachments would then follow.

Cross-posting to Twitter is definitely something that I want to include in the blog. It's more the shorter posts that I would post on Twitter, but not all of them. I think for this a simple checkbox would be sufficient.

Building my blog using Rails has been a great way of making something that I can experiment with more. It's also something that I can create at my own pace. The blog is still using the CDN version of TailwindCSS, WebPacker hasn't been set up, and no there aren't any tests.

This isn't a business system or a product, though, so I can afford to do these things in my own time. It just feels good to be writing code in Rails that I don't need to worry about too much and can do in my own time.

Niklas Göke's word for 2021 is "matter". He'll use this word as his theme for the year to centre all his thoughts and actions. More of a guide for the year than a goal.

I've always liked the idea of themes, whether they be daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly. I must admit though, I haven't done a yearly goal for a couple of years. I have definitely wandered off my intended path over the last couple of years.

I think I have a word in mind for this year, but I'll just keep it to myself if you don't mind.

In the last few months, I've been fairly quiet on the blog front. Just like everything else that went wrong in 2020, I could blame it on the global pandemic, but that's not why I stopped blogging.

I started blogging on Micro.blog while it was in the Kickstarter phase. I liked the idea of not only having a new blogging platform, but one that focused back on RSS feeds. Now though, I feel like I have outgrown Micro.blog. It's has a nice collection of features and themes, but I'm looking for more from my blog. I want it to do more than just display posts and pages. I'd like it to handle long-form articles that fall outside of the chronological order of the blog, handle bookmarks, and track other places where I am active on the web.

To get started, I decided to start moving some content over from my Micro.blog so that it's now hosted here on my main domain. I've been putting everything together using my own blogging engine, which does just enough to display posts in chronological order, supports an RSS feed, and has an admin section to manage posts.

I've still got a lot to do in terms of development, but the main thing I'm taking from this is that I am working with Ruby on Rails again. It's been a long time since I worked with Rails in a full-time capacity, and I do miss it. Rolling my own blog engine gives me the chance to get myself familiar with Ruby on Rails and try out a few different ideas.