Once More, With Feeling

I've come to the conclusion that I've been managing my blog here all wrong. I don't know how many times I've rebooted my blog at this point, or for how many years (decades, really) I've been doing this. How much content I've abandoned for one reason or another. But let's let this be the last time, because I think I'm finally onto something here. I think I like the idea of treating my blog like a scratchpad where I plan and talk about my projects.

Projects, by the way, I can tag like @ThomBruceDotCom. My personal website is the project under scrutiny in this particular post, and I've already done a few things to make it work a certain kind of way. One clever little feature I have already added is that tagging system I'm alluding to here. It identifies words in the text of my blog post that have been prepended with a #, an @ or a + and it treats these as tags, contexts (or "mentions") and projects respectively. Just by way of writing "@ThomBruceDotCom", a custom content transformer will have parsed the tag out of the document and the tag will have appeared at the top of this post. Nifty!

I can tag the technologies I've used to build my website, like #Nuxt and #TailwindCSS. And I could associate the blog post to a project too, let's say... +Reboot@ThomBruceDotCom. Actually, at the time of writing this particular tag, that "+project@context" format isn't yet supported by my transformer. I've made that decision, to phrase my "projects" this way, after completing work on the transformer. But I will revisit it, I think, because I like that format.

These tags are loosely inspired by the "@context" and "+project" tags of #todotxt. todo.txt is a simple text document syntax for writing todos. It has become my preferred way to manage todos of my own and I wanted to make my tagging system here consistent with my usage of tags there, as well as in a separate CLI program I've started using called #jrnl. But this post isn't strictly about either of those. It's about my personal website, thombruce.com. It's about how I intend to manage my blog going forwards.

See, I just wrote up somewhat of a lengthy plan for a syntax parser I intend to write called @Inkpot (actually, Inkpot is intended to be a larger desktop program, we're just starting with the syntax parser). And I wrote that plan directly in the project page for Inkpot on this very website. You can see the page here (with or without that lengthy plan still written there, depending on how long into the future you're reading this). But that's not the place for that plan. That page ought to be a description of the project, a high level overview of it that links to other places (forums, source code, documentation, downloads, etc.). The loose plan I've just written up ought to be somewhere else. It's not a timeless description of the syntax, but a temporal scratchpad of my thoughts as they occurred to me. It's more of a journal entry pertaining specifically to the Inkpot project. It should be in a journal and should link back to the project page itself which, in turn, should link to pages in my journal which do mention the project.

It should have been a blog post! And now-deleted posts like "In the beginning...", "KISS Me" and "Not Saying I've Got Impostor Syndrome But..." should not have been. These were posts written just to fill space, written because I wanted to have some blog posts in my blog, y'know? Written to fill my blog rather than written to a purpose and merely finding themselves homed within it. In a word, pointless.

Part of the problem is that I never really know what to write in my blog. I never really know who my target audience is intended to be. Do I want to write reviews of films I've watched for other cinephiles? Probably, but my focus across the rest of my site is on my programming; it's a little bit of an ill fit. Do I want to write tutorials or guides to the technologies I'm using? Not really. I feel dreadfully unoriginal doing so, and you'll almost certainly find better tutors elsewhere. But do I want to document the process of ideation and development? Heck yeah, I do! Do I want to share my musings about future features and describe how I overcame tricky bugs? Absolutely!

What I want my blog to be then is a journal. Primarily a programming journal, but we will see if I branch out into other topics too. And typically I want my journal entries to link back to the "@Projects" they concern and tag the specific "+JobsAssociatedWith@Projects" that they happen to be focused on.

I want to share the journey of creating stuff! I consider myself a creator. I consider programming a creative profession. I want to demonstrate that, show you the ideas as they form, describe the work which turned those ideas into something useable. That's what I want this blog to be!

Coming soon, I will reintroduce @Inkpot as I begin to make progress with it, I will describe some of the work already done on ThomBruce.com like the tagging system +Tags@ThomBruceDotCom, the use of date-like strings as sequential IDs +SortByDate@ThomBruceDotCom, the search utility +Search@ThomBruceDotCom and the decision to add a bunch of syntax highlighting themes +SyntaxHighlightingThemes@ThomBruceDotCom. Those are all things I genuinely do want to talk about here, so much moreso than KISS philosophy and my sort of self-assessment solo therapy session discussing impostor syndrome. Subjects I'll probably revisit in future but at a time when I feel more like they fit my style here, how we do things here. And how that is is...

We talk about the process! Next up: That. We do that.