Tuesday 28 April

Over the years, I have maintained a variety of blogs and migrated my content between most popular blogging platforms (WordPress, Blogger, Drupal, Ghost, Joomla, Habari, Typepad, Tumblr, Posterous, Jekyll, Django, Octopress, Nikola, Hugo, Pelican).

For this #100DaysToOffload exercise, I am using write.as. I currently have a neglected but perfectly functional blog which uses a static site generator (Hugo) and publishes the content on Amazon S3.

However, it’s five months since I posted on that blog and I can guarantee that if I were to use that platform, the workflow would be:

  1. What is the precise filename syntax of a new Hugo blog post ?
  2. What is the precise syntax of the YAML front-matter ?
  3. How do I publish pages to S3 ?
  4. Oh wait, hang on. I remember now. I wrote a handy shell script for that. Where is it ?

Now, if I was more intelligent, I would not live my life endlessly re-circulating in Groundhog Day, forever condemned to relive my past mistakes. But I’m not so I am.

Yes, I know that I could have a shell alias and an Emacs template that did the necessary and deposited me directly in the editor ready to write. Patches welcome.

Using write.as has no much barriers. You just write. I remarked on Mastodon about the minimalist interface but this was not a criticism, far from it. I truly believe the stripped down minimalist UI is ruddy marvellous.

write-as-minimal.png

Furthermore, write.as fits perfectly with Kev Quirk’s urging to ‘Just. Write’ when he conjured up the idea of 100 Days To Offload.

You don’t even need to register on write.as. You can simply post anonymously.

To get such a minimalist, clutter free, calming environment, you would typically need a ‘Distraction Free’ plugin on most other platforms. That’s after you’d wasted an hour evaluating all the ‘Distraction Free’ plugins.

And another thing, the people behind write.as are great. For example, I had a minor issue with my post yesterday. As it contained two YouTube links, it was flagged as potentially spam and/or mindless click-bait (fair enough) but I sent a quick email to support and the issue was promptly resolved.