For me, it’s hard to work with something till it’s in the usable state. That may sound slightly abusrd for a physical world, like I guess you cannot ride a broken bike, or use a broken drill—
Well, usually you cannot, but their brokenness is a spectre, so—
On the other hand, perhaps the metaphor works for the physical world too. When something is broken, but not entirely, you can still use it, right? But without any joy. My sport bike is broken, and badly needs maintaining. I can still ride it, but it’s on its last legs (so to say), and one day it would broke to the point it’d stop riding me. That would be the point of no return, and a signal for me to actually invest into its renovation.
I expect I’d need to throw out most of its internals, and replace them with new.
Same thing happened to my blogs. I had an idea on the topics I’d like to write, and issued many blogs for them. The idea was not bad in theory. It was even great. I still stand by it, and some blogs shine.
Watch-es
A prominent example is the Basil watches project (notice the link is watch, which may update to become watches later). The project got its very special and very custom automation system that fits my workflow. I write about things I watched into a text file, with zero front matter, and the program assembles everything into a proper post: with toml front matter, downloads the cover poster image, converts it to avif, aseembles a fallback jpeg image for it…
Might Watch
A watch (now watches) project had a counterpart, might.watch. I found it to be a great idea, but it’s not working. I don’t keep that blog, and I’m not planning to maintain it. It’s a rather local-only simple blog to note down recommendations. I found that there’s very little value in it being public, and with it being private, I can more openly write about who recommended me something and why. I mean, if I truly want to share something with others, I should have watched it first. And if we’re talking movies, not TV Shows, here… well, the commitment is not that big, right? Just an hour and a half, or two, and write it into the primary watches blog. That’s my strategy for it now. One less public blog to maintain and think about.
War
There’s my war project, which was intended to become a war diary blog—
A subconscious homage to Astrid Lindgren’s War Diaries, 1939–1945, which I would discover over time, after me starting the blog. Yet, documenting the biggest war in Europe isn’t some kind of very unusual thing to do, isn’t it?
but became a collection of ‘Russia bad’ facts I wasn’t well aware of.
I did a much worse job than Astrid Lindgren did, having close to no energy to assemble everything into a proper collection. Yet, I realised, I’d keep that blog and would slowly fill it with the facts I have at hands. And I’d transfer the private records into this blog.
Which would require me to have tags, and use them properly.
I think of making tags topics. Different word. Not ‘tags,’ but ‘topics.’
Thoughts
I had a blog named thoughts. It was first, before the bits ever happened. It was a project to collect some random thoughts of mine. I was writing them mostly during the night, which means ‘hey, don’t judge me too harsh, some of them are quite stupid, it’s a stream of consciousness of a tired exhausted person.’ Here is the old About page from that blog.
That entire blog is part of this blog now.
Before being merged, the ‘thoughts’ blog went through the redesign, which I regret on discarding. But this one is better, in my opionion. The only thing that would be missed is the serif font, here I settled on the sans-serif one.
And it was renamed to ‘inwards’ too. Instead, I may use the inwards tag for the old entries migrated from there. And new entries that fit the topic of being turned inwards.
Parenting
I have a parenting-themed blog,. which was never deployed. Nothing too meaningful to write about that: I had too little time to do that, and I wanted it to have media (at least photos), and I struggled with how to make it work, both technically, and socially too. The technical part is solved already, now I have my own full-blown fancy CDN (yay, cool, right?), with real hardware. But the social part, it’s difficult to solve. Whom would I share that blog with? Perhaps, I don’t like to share things with random internet stalkers.
Diary
That’s how I came to have a separate diary blog. Think of this blog as my public diary. I’d publish things I mostly don’t care being said publicly. I’m a pretty open person, and I don’t mind some things to be said publicly. Other people may shy on calling morons out, but hey, I’m not an American citizen to being shy of calling their Taco president a horrendous pedo, you know.
There may be people who’d use things written here against me. But I expect those who’d try to read it manually would be pretty much lost by the sheer amount of the content being here. And those who’d automate their stalkering over me, they’d— we’ll see. Perhaps, I’d make some bot protection. I haven’t decided yet.
Neither I’m a political activist (mostly due the lack of energy), nor a journalist. Nor someone wildly popular. So, my opinion is my opinion, and it’s never the one of my employer or anyone else, unless it’s some quote, which is usually indicated, and the source mentioned. I may use sarcasm, so— I don’t plan to indicate that, I guess.
Bits
By the way, I didn’t plan to have bits, at all. A friend told me the idea, and I liked it, mostly the name. Like bits (in contrast to bytes) of information. Geeky thing. Later, when I started this project, I found out, Debian has their own bits. I don’t like Debian, but they’re a major part of Linux ecosystem, which I am a part of too. They deserve respect, it’s just rather me not using them, when I can use something else, like Arch Linux or Fedora.
Here’s the original ‘About this project’ page. I transformed the blog to become just a generic minimalistic blog for my personal usages.
Normies
You may think of what would my blog look like if I didn’t care about appealing to normies, and would live as a webhead hermit whose social circle is the indieweb dorks folks.
No offense meant here, I deeply respect the whole IndieWeb community, as if it’s not for them, I afraid we’re at the ‘dead internet theory’ already. I’d try the for-normies-blog-of-mine to actually be as inclusive and as IndieWeb friendly too.
What I mean is, that one blog is rather ‘not too much of everything, and evergreen posts (what I called ‘stories’).’ This blog means, I don’t try to overexplain things to some internet rando or the people I know personally. Here’s no place for my résumé, hire me, and things like that. That’s the main distinction for me.
Expectations
With all these previous blogs of mine, the ones I’ve merged into this blog, I had one serious issue I didn’t anticipate: some topics could easily overlap. Say, I’d like to write about War, but I cannot escape mentioning my kids with whom we were sitting in a bomb shelter, why Ruzzia keeps slaughtering civilians. Which blog should I choose?
- War Diary? Seems like it.
- Parenting? But it‘s part of the parenting too, in a way.
- Thoughts? If I have some extended thoughts on the topic.
- My personal diary? Which is impossible to motivate myself writing into, there’s no readership, not a single soul, even meself isn’t interested in re-reading it.
- My for-friends diary? I does not exist yet, and I realised it would be very different, it would be mostly audio, if you’re curious to know.
It’s a problem made out of a thin air. I tried fighting it, ending up writing nowhere.
This blog, I expect to have it being alive and sounding.
Allow, Not Require
Note one thing, my approach is that I allow you to be here, and you’re not required. You’re not required to read anything, not to say everything. Just relax and enjoy your time, perhaps you’d find something interesting, as I tend to publish things I found interesting. Or write about something I
A visitor, as I see them, is someone who knows me personally, either offline or online, and is curious to visit me once and again. Like, once a month or three, or maybe a year. The design of the blog tries to be as minimalistic as possible, and not flashy at all. It’s the opposite of my primary blog, jing-jang.
Personal Diary
I’m deploying my personal diary soon, which would be mostly audio records from my time being on the way and talking with nobody particular, but myself. Mentioning things I found interesting, learned, or mostly some boring life stuff. No agenda, and no plan, just some periodic stream, sometimes for an hour a day, sometimes for 15 minutes a week. I’d do that mostly for myself, but it’d be accessible for those who know me personally and is willing to check on me. It’d be password-protected, which you may want to request.
Professional Bits
Since I manage the blogs of Walter, Bjorn, and Vasyl, I’d publish the more professional-related bits in there. With references to computers, design, and web dev respectively. Mike may get a few too, but I’m not really sure about that, we’ll see.
So, expect this blog to become my personal one. I’ll transfer the records to them, when I’d go through the blog slowly.
News
I had a non-published News website, for personal news. I never deployed it, and it had just one entry, published on Feb 24, 2025, that I started this project.
Imagine
My imagine blog is no longer mine, handled it to Bjorn. The link is the old location, I’d transfer it as soon as I’d have time for this.