The Good Stuff

I been a user of write.as since 2017.

It has been my central location on the web for hosting my blog/site since I came from svbtle, medium, blogger, tumblr, (wordpress at one point?) and likely other blogging platforms I can't remember. What made me stay with write.as for so long was how they focused solely on what you write. No ads. No extra fluff.

The editor has been this absolute zero distraction default. I don't think another blogging platform has more of a zen mode than write.as do for writing by default:

Another interesting bit is how you make drafts on write.as. You see, you don't make a draft. You post anonymously. Because, well... unless you link to that article somewhere, no one is going to find it in the ocean that is the web. And it does work. But for me, I never felt comfortable following that practice.

Instead, my functional way of using write.as has been using email. For us old folk (read: using internet since 1990s) this is such a powerful feature. It lets you post an article from a unique email to your blog. Automatically making it into a blog post. And this worked for me. I have had my drafts right next to my 300 other drafts of emails. I didn't have to go full zen mode for writing. I could make a draft without posting it online first!

And for a time, this was good.

The Bad Stuff

One thing I've noticed is that I haven't actually been blogging. For years now. I haven't been talking about things. And it's not that I don't have an opinion. It's more of that I felt a bit of a drain doing so. Specifically on making a post on my platform of choice.

To make a post, I would have to first think what is the format I am using. Not simply prose, but styling on making my changes work on write.as. While write.as supports markdown, on email drafts, it's a bit tricky. You have to make sure you using plaintext. You can't embed any images. You have to link all your sources using no references but direct links. You also need to remember that sometimes the parser may not fully work. So if you publish something, the formatting would come out with raw markdown and unicodes. Leading to some interesting errors.

The other problem is where would I host my images? I would need to upload the images to some site somewhere. Then apply onto the blog.

But do you remember that I like doing this through email? So upload means working through a location, making some annotations on the image, then linking it as a reference on the document. Again. That didn't always work. And I really like using images now.

I do a lot and I mean A LOT of technical writing. My $dayjob is basically 90% (who am I kidding, it's likely 99%) writing documentation, designs, architecture schematics, how to, decision records, request for discussions (RFDs), and more over what is the premise of doing things. And all of it has some type of diagram. The other 80% is meetings, but we not going to open that pandora box here. And yes. The math reaches 170-179% for a reason...

(I like d2lang.org now and I will fight you to death over it.)

Or, an embed of some kind. But ALWAYS an image available. I learned that people like reading when there's pretty pictures involved. And pictures can be really so darn pretty.

Unsupported block: pub.leaflet.blocks.html

Whispers Of standard.site

I think what broke the camel's back for me was what has been happening with standard.site.

Here's myself on traditional blogging site and finding out that there's this new standard on AT Proto. A standard which makes long form content work with the network.

For example, you can have references to any section on the post you want. Using that as a comment spot for threads and potentially spawning other articles and documentation. Something reminiscent of branch.com before Meta came in and squashed it like a bug.

The other really key part is that your posts are part of the Atmosphere network. In the fediverse (aka ActivityPub), you can do something similar of posting and having it commented or reference in the network. But the fluidity is not the same as these new platforms. The network works seamlessly together with the posts.

Now to the credit of the fediverse, you could use say fedify and make your any site work with ActivityPub. Which is what ghost did and is kind of brilliant. But for me, I don't want to host everything all the time. Or making my own custom solution for all the things. I already have enough of that at $dayjob. I am content for blogging stuff, having my data self hosted. Which you can do on AT Proto with self hosting your PDS

So Moving To leaflet.pub

I got my thinking fixed in place. I want to try something on AT Proto using standard.site.

I tried all the three offerings (offprint.app and pckt.blog are the other two), but leaflet.pub feels both the unique option and the only real option for me. For one, they are the sole open source one. I'm not going back to proprietary blogs. Ever.

Write.as has writefreely. The opensource self hosted solution. That is a must for any solution. Being able to shift quickly to self hosted without being impeded is a strong requirement. So for Leaflet, that check is nicely there.

The other reason over even jumping social graphs is what makes leaflet unique. Leaflet is more than 'just' a blogging platform. Leaflet has the ability to make notes and pages backlink to each other. Something like Obsidian but a little more manual. And it can also be set up like a wiki, a technical writing guide, or even diataxis compass!

The main reason I stopped blogging is that I want to do more than 'just' blog. I want to write technical documents. I want to put references like I do on my obsidian setup. I want to be able to have the tool work with me and share what I am doing. So to that end, I'm going to try using leaflet for quite a lot.

We'll see how it goes. Not all I want is ready today on my setup. Hence my homepage is very much a work in progress. But it will get there. I set up one of my sub domains as the main home already. Jumped my bluesky account to be that same domain.I have plans. So again, let's see how it goes.