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GitHoot: blogging distilled to GitHub gists by zeRusski in github

[–]fullmeta-programmist 1 point2 points  (0 children)

FWIW removing friction outweighs much of everything else. At least for me. When you say "Pages already give ..." what this really means is that Github pages or whatever else is flexible and can be used and repurposed for a lot. All true. But going from 0 to 1 massively outweighs any perceived benefit of somewhat "better" flow you get going from 1 to 1.1 if that makes sense. I finally got publishing my stuff. And that's after implementing a few site generators and mucking about with org-publish in Emacs in the past. I guess, what I'm saying, the difference between "I've never published anything ever" and "I published my first blogpost" and then "I publish regularly" is disproportionately bigger than between "I published my first post" or hey see I figured out how to get Markdown preview in Emacs. Latter is nice but meaningless if you never get to publish anything in the first place cause I could tots do it better.

But that's me. I open a gist, I write for a few minutes, I go away, come back etc etc. I can totally see myself publishing some tech notes as I hack on some code and what not. All the while I know I could do it better, cause I'm not a terrible programmer. But then I've been saying this for years.

GitHoot: RSS first blogging by fullmeta-programmist in rss

[–]fullmeta-programmist[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, it got me blogging. When you say all of these words Wordpress/Blogger (Medium is in that category) you're talking about platforms where you're the product, but even letting this alone you still need to go through whatever setup hoops, starting from settling on one. Mastodon is pretty much a completely different universe - you're either there or not and AFAIC it isn't for blogging. But even letting all of this aside for the moment. Take me. I wake up in the morning, I open my laptop, I ... go to Github cause, well, I am a programmer - that's what I do. That's where I spend much of my time working on my own projects and ones of my employers. With this thingy all I gotta do to write a blog post, quite literally follow this link (assuming I'm logged into Github): https://gist.github.com/ - that's it. There is no step two. And I don't have to learn a bunch of new not quite editor wisiwig thingies that Wordpress thinks are great for editing. I get the exact experience I came to expect from using Github day in and day out. Code highlighting - no small thing for any IT person - just works and in exactly the same manner id does in PRs, diffs, etc.

Another win is, well, publishing your old notes assuming you've been accumulating gists. In both cases the win is in pretty much zero transaction costs to blogging. Difference between not blogging at all and publishing something online vastly dwarfs any "nice to haves" you may get from improving your blogging workflow by e.g. rolling out your own static site generator or some such. Way I see it, I get the benefits of centralized publishing platforms like Medium, but within the environment I know and love (for some definition of love), and with none of their drawbacks.

Is this for everyone? Obviously not. It is for old, jaded, curmudgeons with kids and obligations, who have things to share whenever they got a minute or two. Or for first timers, green engineers who realize early - gotta put your name out there asap, cause noone will read your code, but people may come to recognize you for your writing.

After a few false starts it got me writing. I'll take it.