Writing tools

Yesterday I made a tool to hopefully make it easier to write new posts here, and add links and things like that. It’s just a simple html form I’m hosting locally that I can type into and edit with. It uses an api to open a pull request in the git repo for this journal. Then I can edit some more and whatever and when approved, the site gets rebuilt with the new post and goes live.

I’ve been thinking about building this thing for like a year, and finally it works! I know there are better tools out there, so very many blogging and publishing tools. This one though is my very own Rube Goldberg machine. I think there’s something to making the tools by hand that makes me want to use them more. Sure, I’m basically just using Eleventy and other things that are well established, but pulling it all together in a way that makes sense to me feels pretty good.

My next challenge is to come up with things to write about, lol. I definitely don’t want every post here to be meta navel gazing talking about how this website is made, but I guess if that’s what comes out, so be it. I’ve always wanted to write fiction. I mean, I have written a lot of fiction, just none of it has felt good enough or finished enough to publish anywhere. Getting past that hurdle is less about making tools and more about just doing the thing more often, and practicing, and managing time effectively. But this is definitely a good start.