If you can't tell, blogs and personal websites are something that's actually important to me. But I've noticed some reticence on my own part to actually write some posts. Someone I follow on Twitter, though I can't remember who right now, posted about their own efforts to automate their blogging, and how the automation may have played a role in their actual writing of posts. Largely because of the reduction in friction.
I can certainly believe that sentiment - after all, when I used to use Blogspot (before Google ultimately bought and destroyed it) I could create blog posts from my phone. And this was a crappy flip phone! I could take a picture and send an MMS to an email address and the contents would become a blog post with the image automatically embedded. I definitely blogged quite a lot. So what about today? What does my process look like. Maybe I can automate parts of it.
Well, let's just write it out in list format:
cp template.html $(date +%F)-some-title.html.
And that's pretty much it. It's not really a super complicated process, and I'm definitely glossing over a few of the steps. I guess for the most part maybe it's not all the tedium that prevents me from writing. Or maybe just any amount of tedium is a blocker.
Honestly, I think the bigger issue is actually that I get a bit of a dopamine hit when I check my notifications on Mastodon or Twitter. And there's a casualness about using that service as a way to interact with folks.
I think I will probably investigate some kind of automation to this process. I actually do love the hand-crafted nature of my current page, as ridiculous as it is. I don't really need any special tech - just a text editor is fine. But if you want to hook me up with some dopamine, why don't you say thanks?