My blog maintenance/inspiration template has gone through a couple of changes since I first created it, and while I mentioned the new list recently, I didn’t really explain what the different items are. Why not expand on it?

I’m a checklist guy. I like to have a good checklist for anything I do more than a few times. Some of the items don’t fit nicely in a category (and a few come up twice), but, it does its job and gets me unstuck (or just out of boredom) often.

I have my checklist in front of me right now, so let me copy-paste it and then explain below. Here we go:

Maintenance

  • check blog email
  • tinylytics
    • most popular posts in the last month
    • Insights can be interesting
  • new webmentions
  • “On this day” if exists:
    • check for typos
    • check for links/broken images/missing emojis
  • check plugins (updates?)
  • delete old bookmarks (Micro.blog)
  • photo page (add 📷 to posts)

Checking emails I get from other bloggers has become a routine, so it’s mostly something I can remove. In the past, emails were infrequent and I needed a reminder. I leave it here because it’s always nice to open my blog’s email and see what discussions I’ve had with others.

Tinylytics is a nice and small analytics tool that gives me just the information I need. Popular posts used to be emacs/org-mode related, but that has changed lately with bubbles, where some posts get a lot of exposure. It’s also interesting to see what gets more traction organically (without bubbles or something similar blowing those up), as I barely tend to “advertise” my posts on social media these days1.

Webmentions is something I keep forgetting to check. Micro.blog has those built-in (though if I’m not mistaken you do need to turn them on somehow in your theme). A few months back, I learned that there’s someone on lemmy.world who seems to link to my post on a regular basis. I don’t know who because that requires logging in, and my old account wouldn’t work, and I get too lazy to sign to yet another social network… so if you happen to be that person, hey! Say hello if you’d like. Sometimes other bloggers end up here too, like Jack and Dan, who link to a post of mine directly. Thanks guys!

My On This Day process is something I explained before - an opportunity to check past posts for errors and fix those if needed.

Checking for plugins doesn’t happen too often (it’s not a big deal if I’m a version or two behind; this is not WordPress). As new updates are introduced, I try to go through them carefully as some can break the website at times.

Bookmarks is Micro.blog’s “read it later” feature, which I use often. I go through the list there and delete what I’ve already read and delete old articles that I don’t need. I don’t have to do that, but I like knowing that what I have there is new and waiting for me to read, not an archive of old stuff.

My blog has a Photo page and photos are basically automatically added when I use the 📷 icon (there’s a bit more of a process behind it that has to do with how Micro.blog works, but that’s for another time). This here is a reminder to comb through my more recent posts, give or take the last month or so, and add this icon to posts that contain photos that should end up there. I just added a couple while doing this post.

Inspiration

  • Check old blog for posts to grab
  • Journal
  • Bookmarks (in Micro.blog)
  • RSS feeds!
  • Fosstodon (org-mode column)
  • BlueSky (check for Emacs, and see followers)
  • Kagi small web (in browser) for sites
  • Take a random picture

My old blog, which I used to run through GitHub (and later GitLab), Hugo, and Netlify, contains posts I like to bring over to my current blog sometimes. It’s a good way to reflect and write updates as well. This is why this blog, if you go to the archive page, sometimes has only a few posts from before 2023: these older posts are manually moved over from the old site.

My journal is another good place to find posts in the making. Sometimes all I need to do is to take out a few names and specific information and make a post out of what I wrote there; at other times I need to wade through a brainstorm I’ve had to understand what the hell I was grumping about, but it’s almost always worth it. You can’t get more personal on a personal blog than this.

My bookmarks were already mentioned above, but here it’s a reminder to actually read them, instead of deleting old articles and tidying things up.

RSS feeds are too routine to be reminded of here now. I read through my RSS feeds at least once a day, bookmarking things, making notes to write emails to others… there’s always someone who’s wrong (or right!) on the internet, somewhere.

Fosstodon is my Mastodon server and the only social network I still like. I have dedicated columns for org-mode and digital gardens I check, and a list of some folk who post there and don’t have a blog yet (at least not that I know of).

I said Mastodon is the only social network I like and that remains true: Bluesky is too angry for me and has too many “literally” and “friendly reminder” kind of passive-aggressive posts. A few folks post there that I care about, but I think it’s not going to make it when I revamp this list the next time.

Kagi Small Web is pretty good, but I feel like they made it a bit too big recently. Some of the blogs there tend to belong to small businesses or to people who think like businesses. Still, it’s a very good place to go and find new blogs. It’s also a good way to see how people present their blog and get inspired by CSS and themes quickly, if you keep clicking “next” for that purpose.

And finally, a personal favorite: just snap a picture. I go out of my room with my phone, look around, and take a picture - often while taking a walk. When I’m in this mindset, I don’t look for anything special - quite the opposite. I’d take a picture of ordinary things that are boring otherwise.

Footnotes

1: Perhaps unsurprisingly, the “second place” posts, those that are popular but not the most popular, tend to be facts about my life or random “glitches” in my human programming. The more people follow me, the more popular these become, and I tend to get interested in the same kind of posts on other blogs. This is what makes us the indie web, yes?