2023-09-03

Resurrection

I’m going back into blogging again.

My old blog slowly petered out. Part of the reason is that I made it so darn difficult to push changes to my site. The previous site was built on Pelican, which is a Python static site generator. It was hosted on an AWS EC2 instance. I had a script that would build the site, but it only worked on one computer (that I didn’t use very often). And because I built the site when I knew less about Python, CSS, Javascript, etc. than I do now, it became less and less rewarding. Furthermore, my content was really just a smattering of random things from my life. I think that people suggest blogging about whatever is on your mind when you first get into it, but looking back, although there was some good content, a lot of it was junk. There were some posts that I had poured a lot of time into, but they were buried under random posts. It felt like a mess.

I’m getting back into blogging because I was reflecting this evening on my life. I was realizing that I’m very distracted right now, and I don’t really feel like I have a main goal right now. I don’t have a regular exercise routine, I’m not as intentional with my diet, or my wake-up times, or even my devotions as I once was.

I’ve been bothered for a while by all of this. I’ve got a great day job that pays all the bills so my wife can stay home with our kid. My day job even gives me every other Friday off. We have no debt. I have a gym at work that I can work out at for free whenever I want. So there’s really no reason why I shouldn’t be having a wonderful devotional life, exercising several times per week, making time for family vacations, and any other goals I have for my life.

As I reflected back on my life, I remembered that the time in my life where I was most on-point was when I had an accountability partner with whom I shared my plans for the day at the start of the day (actually, usually the evening before), and then I would tag up at the end of the day about how my day went. I would usually do this over text message. The benefit to doing it over text message was that it was profoundly simple. SMS/iMessage requires no configuration, no server, no compiling. It was the opposite of what my Pelican blog was.

So this time, I’m trying to learn from those mistakes. I’ve tried Jekyll, Hexo, Pelican, and all of them rely on installing a big runtime engine on your machine (Ruby, Node.js, or Python) with associated packages. Hugo came out in 2013, and it can be installed as a stand-alone binary. This means that compiling my site on different machines should be a piece of cake. In fact, I’m thinking of either compiling this using AWS Lambda, or a new home server automatically once I get everything running. But in the mean time, I’m just using a basic default template and my laptop.

Goals

The goal with the blogging is to document my journey from couch potato to a well organized life. Perhaps one day, I’ll look back at these daily reflections and be able to trace what steps I took, what things worked very well, and what ideas I had that I thought would work very well that didn’t work well at all. We’ll see.

But I think that it will actually be more of a means of encouragement to others out there who are likewise disorganized and feeling a little bit aimless in life. Perhaps they can read through what I’ve written and chart their own journey based on some of the lessons that I’ve learned.

I’m not really sure where all of this will wind up. But I do know that when you find one keystone habit and faithfully do it every day, then you snowball into a big result.

123 for tomorrow

Daily documenting my 123 commitments will be my keystone habit. I’ll probably write more about this later.

2023-09-04:
[/] (B) Write an important document for my day job
[/] (M) Inbox-zero my OmniFocus2 inbox
[X] (M) Outline Noah sermon in Obsidan
[X] (S) Restart my StitchFix subscription
[ ] (S) Restart home server
[ ] (S) Write blog entry for tomorrow