First Post
Writing for fun and learning
3 minutes
Let’s try Blogging again.
Let’s try blogging again. This time I’m sure I’ll stick with it!
Because I’ve made no fundamental changes whatsoever but I’m just feeling it you know?
Obviously that won’t work. I need a goal and a workflow / set of tools that make writing as friction-less as possible.
I want a functional website that requires minimal ongoing effort tech-wise and let’s me focus on writing.
Tools
I’m hoping I’ve found a flow that works well for myself:
- Emacs
- Org Mode
- Hugo
- S3
Emacs
I use Emacs as my daily driver. It’s a very powerful tool which is extremely extensible. Despite being a text editor from the 70s (“Gnu.Org” n.d.) Emacs is still ppopular with a dedicated community that continue to support and extended it’s capabilities.
Org Mode
Org Mode is a fantastic Major Mode for Emacs which primarily provides the ability to use Emacs as an Outliner. Org provides a very light syntax that gives your text documents structure, basically headings, lists and links and a lot more.
* Heading 1
** Subheading 1
** TODO Subheading 2
* Heading 2
- list item 1
- list item 2
There are a lot of additional Emacs packages built on top of Org Mode such as Ox-Hugo which is an Org exporter that outputs Hugo compatible markdown.
Hugo
An Open Source Static site generator written in Go, Hugo is blazing fast. It comes with a large collection of community contributed themes such as this one, Paige. It is very neat tool that once you’ve set up your theme and structure you focus mostly on writing.
S3 Static Site
Hosting a static site on AWS is easy, simple and cheap. Not having to run a server is great and you can use crowdfund to help with improved distribution speed.
Goal
I want to start writing in, my very basic, Spanish. I’ve been trying to learn the language for ages and I reckon I need to start engaging with it more to improve. My domain also happens to be a .es one so I should probably provide some Spanish language content… Hola!
I’ve discovered that ChatGPT is very good at providing quick feedback about Spanish writing. It can provide spelling and grammatical fixes along with suggestions for sounding more native and it does this essentially in real time which I’m hoping will boost my learning.
I also want to occasionally write in English about whatever grabs my interest. It’ll probably be quite an eclectic selection of topics.
Wish me luck and Thanks for reading!