My blogging process

...is a fucking mess. Just a total shitshow. Somebody help me!!

Here’s what I’ve got.

My main site is rscottjones.com, and that’s where I’ve tried to keep all the action. That’s my permadomain. It’s an old Wordpress install that’s undergone numerous...we’ll call them “eras.” A personal blog for the longest time, then focused on travel, then posts merged in from a separate travel blog I wrote for awhile, now moving back towards a more personal feel.

But, of course, the design sucks and the plugins I used to build it have expired. I’m due for a total overhaul, but I’m stuck on how comprehensive I want it to be, and if WP is still the right choice.

Then I have my “public notes” site, which is an Obsidian Publish site at rscottjon.es. I had expected to really build this out (in part to avoid my main site mess!), but life got busy and I wonder if this sort of thing shouldn’t just live on my main site anyway.

I then decided to try micro.blog, which is over at rsjon.es. The original idea there was to share fun links, like we all did back in the day. I originally wanted these to be “asides” style in my main website, but alas, I couldn’t figure out how to do that—so microblog it was.

Going into the year, my thought was for this all to be a cascade of increasingly shorter URLs as the level of polish and required forethought declined. My longer posts and most important pages would end up on rscottjones.com, some other notes and shorter posts and not-quite-ready stuff would live at rscottjon.es, and rsjon.es would be used for links and microblogging, perhaps even replacing my mastodon account.

Did I mention that I also started paying for a Scribbles blog? Yeah, that's what you're reading right now. It seemed like a great way to participate in #WeblogPoMo2024, which I’ve enjoyed doing, even if I quickly got behind due to other life events. While I paid for a year and have enjoyed the experience so far, I don’t see this as being a serious solution for me—I just need a lot more features than what it will ever offer. It lives at scribbles.rscottjones.com right now (you can see the url, can't you?), providing a dedicated rss for #WeblogPoMo2024, no matter where I post.

Ok, so that’s the website mess. Let’s get to the mess that’s my writing tools.

I have drafts...well, everywhere. It’s ridiculous at this point. I have drafts in Scribbles, in rscottjones.com, in a folder in Obsidian, and on iA Writer, and in Drafts, and also in Ulysses, but that my subscription for that isn’t active. Most of these aren’t full-on drafts, but snippets of thought, turns of phrase, the outline of an thesis I just conjured up in the shower.

The biggest problem here is that I’ve experimented widely with workflows—a solid place to capture quick ideas, and to draft without distraction, and to edit and finalize a post. But I’ve yet to find something that’s really worked well for me. And so each platform holds a batch of “tests” that I haven’t finished, or the “better capture this idea in [...]” moments.

This chaos hasn’t mattered much, as I haven’t been writing very often anyway. So it all just feels like clutter. Some half thoughts, some useful paragraphs camouflaged by sentence fragments and quick lists. I really don't know what I want it all to look like, and I hate designing websites, and so it's all something that I can conveniently not quite get around to.

I guess what I’m saying is, it’s an absolute modern marvel that I’ve managed to publish anything at all this month!

[27/31] for #WeblogPoMo2024
[29/100] for #100DaystoOffload