Photos
- 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)
- 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
- Two tofu “cubes” as mentioned (the off-white yellowish pieces with a bit of texture)
- 1 mini (Persian) cucumber
- 3 small radishes
- 1 small strip of Violife vegan feta cheese (other brands are also good), cut into cubes
- a handful of cherry tomatoes (yellow in this salad)
- a handful of mixed greens (spinach, arugula, possibly one more thing I forget right now)
- half a small lemon, for juice
- Instead of an email, I ended up writing a post.
- Speaking of writing, I tweaked my custom AI prompt for “post polish” with Kagi’s assistants (I will expand on this further down the line)
- Due to the above, I also learned that Kagi featured a picture of my blog in their update post.
- The update post itself reminded me how cool Kagi’s small web is, now even better!
- Due to the above, I also learned that Kagi featured a picture of my blog in their update post.
- Playing around with Kagi’s small web, I found another interesting blogger to follow
- Reading the Micro.blog feed, I found out miljko is building an Emacs to Micro.blog package!
- Emacs + Micro.blog + frequnt posts = another person to add to my RSS feeds
- This reminded me about adventures on Micro.blog by Scott. Yet another RSS feed to add.
Every time I go get coffee around West Village, I feel like I’m in a different city. The contrast between our quiet neighborhood with the trees and birds in upper Manhattan and this is striking and fun. 📷
My Inspiration Checklist for Writing Blog Posts
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
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
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?
Traveling to a remote site for work today, got a chance to enjoy the beautiful weather and take a breather. 📷
Lazy Chopped Salad
One of the awesome things that came out of me becoming mostly vegan since August of last year is the farmer’s market.
The walk there, every weekend, takes me about 40 minutes. It’s through the quiet streets and city parks of Upper Manhattan that stand in contrast to its otherwise loud and grungy surroundings. It’s not a particularly big market, just one short street behind a school, but the smaller selection of food (especially since I don’t buy dairy or meat products) motivates me to explore different ways to make food. 📷
One of my more recent discoveries was the extra-firm tofu, which they sell already cut into snack-size, water-free pieces. I sometimes just grab one right from the fridge and eat it “raw”.
Lazy Salad
I call it “lazy” because of how I mix it, and also because I was too lazy to make more food. The tofu makes this filling enough, at least for me.
What’s in it
The cucumber, tomatoes (both not in season yet), and the lemon are from the grocery store. The rest is from the farmer’s market. My local store tries different varieties of cherry tomatoes, but I find the ones I like the most seem to come from Canada. As for the mini cucumber, I grab whatever they have because they often don’t have any. It’s a shame because these cucumbers are tastier, and their size makes them perfect for a quick addition to any meal, or even as a snack on their own, cut into strips with a small dash of spicy salt.
The difference a good knife can make
You can cut all these veggies with whatever knife you have, but it’s the chef’s knife I got not too long ago that makes me want to chop. Vegetables! I mean vegetables, yeesh.
With this knife, it’s easy to cut softer things (like leaves or tomatoes) without a problem. I did watch a couple of YouTube videos explaining a few cutting techniques and how to hold the knife when I bought it. While I’m /far/ from being an expert, I recommend you also watch a couple if you get one. You don’t want any fingers in the salad; this is a vegan recipe after all.
You can see from the picture that I didn’t chop anything too fine. Big enough to stab individual pieces with a fork, small enough that it fits in the bowl you’re going to eat from. Fast and easy.
Middle Eastern salad seasoning
I think most if not all Middle Eastern salads use three main ingredients when it comes to making the salad “dressing,” or as I call it, juice, because that’s what it is. It’s just lemon, salt, and black pepper.
I recommend you find a place that sells black peppercorns that you can grind yourself. You can taste the difference immediately. I get my black pepper at the same place I get my coffee beans (along with the salt, pink Himalayan, which I grind also, but that’s not as important). As for the lemon, get a real one and squeeze it with your hand over a strainer, or get a lemon squeezer. I love my personal portion with half a lemon, but this might be too much for you, so just squeeze it into a spoon and use that if you want less.
Mixing
Add the salt, the pepper, and the lemon on top of the salad. If your bowl is full of salad to the point that pushing a spoon in to mix it means you’ll end up spilling stuff over (as the case was for me), just cover it with another bowl, upside down. Then, above a sink (because some juice will spill out), carefully turn the whole thing over, and back - do this 3 to 5 times, and… it’s ready.
You could make the salad in a bigger bowl and mix it. Actually, you can also use your hands (you washed them, right? And you use them anyway to chop the veggies, so you’ve already touched everything). It is sometimes easier to “massage” the salad gently.
Stuff to change around
You could easily substitute vegetables in the salad depending on what’s available. A red onion (I’d do half) instead of the radishes, or perhaps some Seitan-based meat instead of the feta cheese or the tofu. You could also add almonds or pine nuts to the mix if you feel fancy (want super fancy? throw the pine nuts into a frying pan and heat over low for a few minutes to toast them lightly). You can change the portion or how fine you cut also.
Over the past few days, I’ve been taking walks again. This was something I used to do regularly, but now that I sit here on a park bench, I realize it’s probably only been a weekly habit at best. 📷
Both weather and work kept me away from my walks. With the weather getting better and work pressing, which means I need to reset my brain often, I find myself craving walks more often.
Sometimes I catch myself thinking about how we take certain things for granted. This park, this bench, this pleasant breeze right now; the fact that I can walk at all. It’s all truly wonderful, isn’t it?
Some color goes a long way 📷
It’s Pie day for me.
Well, the pie day was on March (3/14). But every month on the 14th, I decided to have a pizza. Otherwise, I don’t eat cheese. I stopped completely, besides unavoidable butter in some pastries and such. 📷 🍕
More signs of spring 📷
I took a walk and listened to the birds for a moment. It’s always nice to get chances like this in Manhattan:
Oddly Satisfying. 📷
A good day to have a blog
Since waking up early in the morning (sleep? What sleep?) I’ve been active around my blog and enjoyed dedicating time to this personal work that doesn’t get much attention during my day-to-day.
Here are a few things I got into:
Then, thinking about all the stuff I’ve done around my blog today, I thought about expanding my “blog check list”, adding the few items I’ve learn. It is now divided into maintenance and inspiration parts:
* Blog Stuff to do
** Maintenance
- [ ] check taonaw email
- [ ] tinylytics:
- [ ] most popular posts in the last month (3 places)
- [ ] Insights can be interesting
- [ ] new webmentions (under *Account* on the Micro.blog site)?
- [ ] "On this day" if exists:
- [ ] check for typos
- [ ] check for bad links/broken images/missing emojis
- [ ] check plugins (updates?)
- [ ] delete used bookmarks (Micro.blog)
- [ ] photo page (add 📷 to posts)
** Inspiration
- [ ] Check old blog for posts to import
- [ ] Journal
- [ ] Bookmarks (in Micro.blog)
- [ ] RSS feeds!
- [ ] Kagi small web (in browser) for sites
- [ ] Take a random picture
I feel like a very efficient blogger today 😄