300 Posts

03 Dec 2018 at 18:47 // under Site

I noticed after posting last night that I now have 300 posts or articles on this site. While the oldest posts were written in August 2006, it would be unfair to say that this has been a continuous blog stretching 12 years. About half the posts have been made in the last 6 months alone!

It is more like a combination of various blogs I have written over the years, usually with long gaps between posts. I always intended to maintain regular posts, about once a month, but for one reason or another life got in the way and I would fail to post anything for long periods.

The original articles are actually former "Facebook Notes", written when the Facebook feed was new and access to Facebook was limited to those with a student email address from a limited number of universities.

After I had been posting semi-regularly to Facebook for a while, I decided to start as a regular blog. I think I first used blogger, and had the posts syndicated to Facebook. Years later I moved all the blogger posts to a wordpress.com blog before moving again to a self hosted wordpress blog.

It was at that time that I combined my regular website with my blog posts to have one site. This self hosted site lasted around 5 years before I decided to change to a static site.

One thing I didn't appreciate when changing to a static site was that it would make posting much harder. Before I could write posts from mo phone (I didn't often but I could). After it was virtually impossible¹ to write on my phone.

This year I decided to write more regularly. I challenged myself to write daily for as long as possible. I used a simple note taking app that would synchronise with my server to write the posts, then used SSH to copy the file to the correct folder and recompile the site.

The mantra of "If something is difficult to do, do it more often" came into play. I wrote a script to help with the copying and setup a shortcut. I continued to improve the script, so all I have to do is write the post in the notes app, press the publish shortcut on my phone, review the draft site and confirm to publish to the main site.

I am not sure if I will continue to post at such a high rate, but if I do, I will have doubled the number of posts again by this time next year. I suspect that if I don't maintain daily posting, then there will be very long gaps between future posts. I can't seem to get a nice balance.

1. I could SSH in to my server and write it that way. ↩

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