December 2024 Archives

Cooking with Wine

TFW a recipe calls for a glass of wine but you can’t get the cork back in the bottle so you just have to drink the rest of it.

Ah well, what’s a chef to do? 🤷🍷

Morning, Sheep

Not quite ready for wintering indoors, our village’s hardy sheep are enjoying pasturing in the large field near the school this beautiful but chilly morning.

99 Days of Blogging

With this post, for the first time ever¹, I’ve blogged for 99 consecutive days!²

Calendar showing Sunday 25 August through Sunday 1 December inclusive, with a coloured "spot" on each day with a size corresponding to the number of posts made on that day, broken into a pie chart showing the proportion of different post kinds. — The dots are sized based on the number of posts and broken-down by post kind: **articles** are blue, **notes** are green, **checkins** are orange, **reposts** are purple, and **replies** are red³.

I didn’t set out with the aim of getting to a hundred⁴, as I might well manage tomorrow, but after a while I began to think it a real possibility. In particular, when a few different factors came together:

Kicking off my first sabbatical gave me lots of free time, and although I’ve mostly filled it with voluntary work and travel, there’s been a greater-than-usual amount of blogging (often about those two things!) too.
Posting a daily photo of my bleppy dog for the month of ~~September~~ Bleptember provided an early boost.
Travel’s given me more opportunity for geocaching (and, this last week, geohashing), as reflected in my copious checkin logs for that period.
Earlier this year, inspired by Clayton Errington, I came up with a process to streamline my mobile blogging “flow”⁵. I now use a custom Progressive Web App to provide a better interface for quickly posting on-the-move to one or both of this blog and my personal Mastodon account, which I tested heavily during Bleptember.

Previous long streaks have sometimes been aided by pre-writing posts in bulk and then scheduling them to come out one-a-day⁶. I mostly don’t do that any more: when a post is “ready”, it gets published.

I didn’t want to make a “this is my 100th day of consecutive blogging” on the 100th day. That attaches too much weight to the nice round number. But I wanted to post to acknowledge that I’m going to make it to 100 days of consecutive blogging… so long as I can think of something worth saying tomorrow. I guess we’ll all have to wait and see.

Footnotes

¹ Given that I’ve been blogging for over 26 years, that I’m still finding noteworthy blogging “firsts” is pretty cool, I think

² My previous record “streak” was only 37 days, so there’s quite a leap there.

³ A massive 219 posts are represented over the last 99 days: that’s an average of over 2 a day!

⁴ This isn’t an attempt at #100DaysToOffload; I already achieved that this year as it does not require consecutive days. But it’s a cool challenge anyway.

⁵ My site’s backed by WordPress, but the mobile wp-admin isn’t the best and my site’s so-customised that apps like Jetpack mangle my metadata.

⁶ As you might now, I consider myself to be the primary audience for my blog: everybody else comes second. That’s why I don’t collect any webstats! When I used to collect webstats, I would sometimes pre-write and “schedule” posts, but without them it just feels pointless to do so!