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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

Just use good old /about or equivalent. For most people who aren’t thinking about their website every day, /now will inevitably end up as “what I was doing when I last remembered I have a /now page” instead of what they’re actually doing now.

Idea for the future: in a few years, check how many /now pages were last updated in May 2024.

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I host mine on (the rather very good) omg.lol and they send me a weekly reminder via email... I can even update it by replying to the email using markdown

https://darreninthe.net/now

For every Derek Sivers there are 9999 people who don't even care to update their website on a yearly basis.

I use a jekyll/CI/static hosting workflow, and even though I make a zillion git commits a day, somehow branching, editing, PRing, and merging one to my website seems like friction. I have a 4-5 posts in my head I want to make that have been languishing for weeks/months because it feels like too much of a hassle.

I'm thinking of moving to a wordpress-backed CMS (that gets ingested by the static page build system) just to remove it, so I can simply type into a box and smash a button.

Why not develop on and push directly to your main branch?

I might break my website and feel like a dumbass. PRs automatically generate a staging site at a unique URL that ends up in my chat that I can preview and sanity check before merge.

this is what i've done. never really broke the site in a way that i couldn't easily roll back and fix, and that was rare. what really slowed me down was messing up my local ruby installation because i really don't know anything about ruby. chatgpt helped me finally fix that though.

Funny, I'm in the same situation; I'm endlessly tinkering, and I feel like I could benefit from documenting some of it on my "blog" if nobody else does, but the friction of cloning to whichever machine I'm on, probably need to update my SSH key in Github because I've moved to another distro, then writing up and trying to keep the high-standard I've tried to for my blog, with quality images, and step-by-step instructions beginners should be able to follow, means I haven't updated it in months, possibly not even this year.

Similar state, ended up with Netlify CMS (now the weirdly-named https://decapcms.org). Still just my repo and static page build process, but I get a basic GUI to make and edit pages.

Wordpress (or some other well-supported CMS) is nice too, because you can edit from anywhere if you're not at your main development PC. I've written & published blog posts in 30 minutes on my phone in the kitchen, including taking and uploading the photos, while waiting for dinner to finish cooking. As with everything we're not getting paid to do, removing friction is key.

What I ended up doing was writing a PHP script that would scrape threads off my Mastodon account that were posted with a specific hashtag, and turn them into threadreader-style static HTML blog posts (with some minor automated massaging to remove hashtags etc). For my scatterbrain, composing and posting a Mastodon thread is a lot lower-stakes than writing a blog post.

Same, I think it’s the context-switching of managing git and writing the post you have in mind.

I’m on the CLI all day, but even just cd’ing into the project directory feels like friction when I want to post something.

I’ve considered a hosted data store with a private submission form, and then that’s what gets ingested into the build system.

Surely if you can get that workflow up and running, it wouldn't be beyond you to automate the process and slap an html form in front of it?

I went through the same loop. For now, I've settled on Ghost, but always have an eye out for something easy to maintain and write on.

I was in exactly the same position but the route I went was a little programme on my server that reads incoming mail to a secret address and crafts a blog post from it

Bingo. I made a /now page a couple years ago, and removed it a couple months ago, rather than pretend I was ever going to update it. It was just the original text I wrote when I made the page. I assume that's the normal case for these pages.

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