As with many new ideas, staring at a blank slate can often be the hardest stage to overcome. I have tried to restart this blog many times since the beginning of the pandemic and have never pushed it past the starting point.
This year I want to do better, and inspired by the Bring Back Blogging effort, maybe it will work!
Instead of starting with some Hugo templates I’ve used at work and trying to bend them to the look/feel I want for a personal site, I’m trying a new system called Astro with a pre-defined theme called AstroPaper. I long ago gave up being able to keep up with all the front-end development world, so I’m mostly building on the shoulders of others with the look/feel and trying to focus on content.
Most of the content here will likely not be of long-form material. Those take a long time to pull together. With a family and kids, I don’t have a lot of time outside of work to focus on that sort of material. I may have some of that occasionally, but I expect much of the material at the start will be of ‘medium length’ - shorter than a ProPublica piece, but longer than a tweet/toot.
So, with the new year in mind, here are some of the things I want to work on (other than writing things down):
- Personal Fitness
- Building a multi-sensor for home observation/automation (temp/humidity/motion/light levels)
- Building a mobile media server for use when travelling
- Building out better monitoring of home energy usage