Wednesday the 4th of May 2022
Still figuring this blog thing out. It’s fun though. I’ve kept different journals over the years but recently settled on Google Docs because it’s accessible on all my devices and since I’m lazy, that works well for me.
But like it’s still private (in the sense that not everyone can view it, not in the sense that Google products are privacy-focused and that’s all well-and-good because, you know, private thoughts and all that. But I’m old enough and ugly enough now to really turn this into a diary-type thing.
Why? Well, let’s let Cory Doctorow explain it since he’s been doing this for years:
https://doctorow.medium.com/the-memex-method-238c71f2fb46
For me, this is here to keep me honest. You’ll notice I have a little section about my fiction wordcount for the day – so if I keep that up, you’ll get a sense of what I’m working on outside this blogging and my little tech news stories.
It’s also a place for ideas to just happen and be talked about, but that was my old diary anyway. If this were indexable in some way, it might serve as more of a Memex-type thing Doctorow mentioned – something for me to consider and improve upon, actually.
But importantly there’s an opportunity for an audience with a public blog. I don’t advertise this other than through my Twitter profile, but we’ll get there and hey – if you have the link you can read it so that’s already more public than my private don’t-share-the-keys Google Docs diary.
I’ll start sharing one day, when I’ve got more down. Linking on Twitter, Facebook, wherever.
Also need to consider SEO which is, uh, not great for this blog since it doesn’t even come up when I search my name (I’ve had ‘Case Tonkin’ as the author because well I dunno I like the sound of it but now I’m thinking that might be sub-optimal).
Other things to work out are the formatting for links and titles especially. I like Doctorow’s method of putting links in as visible entities in their own line. Partly because it’s unique but also it’s transparent, saying THIS IS A LINK AND YOU CAN READ IT so you know what you’re clicking on instead of just hitting some blue text and hoping for the best. So I’ll stick with that.
I settled on the “Day the date of month year” format for my Google Docs journal so let’s keep that as well. It’s readable and unambiguous. There’s no wondering which year or whatever and can be seen by humans. If I want to do different titles I can do that, too. It’s my damn blog after all.
Current Projects
‘Kaylene’ a short story about a digital artist: 277 words today (1,189 total)
‘Narcissus’ a novel: planning, character development
2022 fiction word count: 12,969