Over the years I’ve tried, and mostly failed, at keeping any type of blog space. I’ve written maybe a dozen of these “First Post!” style entries, and here is my dozen+1. At least it’s not also Friday the 13th!

Part of my self inflicted headache is due to a too frequent random shifting of platforms. I tend to self-host everything, so trying out some “new” thing is often an interesting technical aside and/or rabbit hole. A predictable side-effect is paying way more attention to the backend bits and bobs instead of actually writing stuff.

What’s changed? Well, nothing substantial really. I suppose I’m a bit older now, and my home lab setup, from which all this stuff is hosted, has now been mostly stable for a long stretch. There will be more posts about that whole setup later on. For nonsensical reasons, I do tend to align “new starts” around the new year, which is coming up in a month or so at the time of this writing. This time around I’m taking the approach of getting an early start instead of viewing January 1st as some kind of "start your engines" marker. So that’s different, I suppose.

Also, I've settled on using Ghost as the platform. Part of the reason is I'm looking forward to the eventual integration with Activity Pub, as I've been very pleased with my shift to Mastodon a couple of years ago. A close runner-up was Hugo. Part of my reason for moving away from Ghost in the past had to do with not being able to develop a good workflow for automatically publishing and updating posts. As it turns out, that's a solution that is looking for a problem. Good old copy-pasta is perfectly fine for the volume of posts that I aspire to produce.

This go around, I’m also trying to embrace the idea of not dwelling too much on each post, and lean more into just posting the damn things. I’ve intended to do that in the past too, but then didn’t actually do it. We’ll see how well it sticks (or doesn't) this time.

What to expect? To be fair, I’m not sure. In the past I tried to pre-categorize types of posts, which hasn't done me any favors. This time around, I’m trying to embrace the randomness, with maybe trying to discern organization later on. Right now I only have two "sections". This space, for Blog things, and a Fiction section, where I'll probably be putting short story / flash fiction type things. I'm going to leave it at that for now. Now for the hard part ... writing and posting a second post!