New Jekyll Blog, New Resolutions

As 2018 draws to a close, I’ve revamped my blog again, this time using straight Jekyll and my own fork of Artem Sheludko’s Flexible Jekyll theme. My old blog was on Octopress, and it seems to be abandonware, and with GitHub doing Jekyll natively now, it seemed to make sense.

So now that I have a new blog, I’m resolving to write more, spend more time reading long-form text (books and articles written with expertise and thought), and spend less time on short-form text (hot takes, social media and the 24-hour news cycle).

Migrated from SquareSpace to Octopress

I’ve moved my blog from Squarespace to OctoPress.

I’ve gotten more and more frustrated with SquareSpace over the last couple of years. They moved to their new version 6 product, but it has no API access. This is a real annoyance for me, but SquareSpace doesn’t seem to care.

So my only options for adding content there are their buggy web interface, their even buggier iPad app, or stay on their old version 5, which is very buggy, and not getting any development resources.

Blog Moved to SquareSpace

Even though  Blogger is back now, I’ve moved my blog to SquareSpace.  Truth be told, I was never particularly happy with blogger.com anyway, and I don’t mind paying for decent software and services, and the SquareSpace iPad app is the best blogging experience on the iPad I’ve found, so the Blogger Outage was the kick in the pants that I needed to make the switch.

Glad I did.

SEO fail: Is This Thing On?

So I’ve blogged every day for a week now and, oddly enough, I can’t find my own site on google, even when I look for exact matches for strings in older blog posts. I’ve started using a plugin for RapidWeaver, SiteMap, that’s supposed to improve SEO, but I don’t know if it’s helping.That being said, it’s still early, and I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’ve read several often contradictory books and articles about SEO, but I’ve never really tried it out myself, so I’ll see how it ends up.The two things I ’m concerned about at the moment are 1) I’m using the RapidBlog plugin to mirror content between my site and Blogger, and so it’s possible that my site is getting ranked down because the content is in two places (although that isn’t the case for some other sites I’ve found that are running RapidBlog), and 2) The RapidBlog plugin doesn’t let me change thetags on the permalink pages, so the articles might not appear as relevant. I might end up trying a combination of RapidBlog (which I love, because it makes blogging much more convenient) and normal RapidWeaver blog pages and see if the “normal” blog pages show up better in Google. Regardless, it’s still early in my learning process, and I’ll document what I figure out here.

Look, Ma, no laptop!

I implied earlier that when I use BlogPress to write a blog post with my iPhone or iPad, that I had to wait until I got to my laptop to publish it. That isn’t true. If I want to tweak it in RapidWeaver, then I have to wait for my laptop, but if I’m okay posting it without going through a proper preview step, I can just hit “Publish Now!” in BlogPress, and let RapidBlog handle the rest.

Blogging workflow with Reeder

I’m a huge fan of Reeder for both the iPhone and iPad. It’s so much faster and more convenient than any other Google Reader client I’ve dealt with, I haven’t launched Socialite or NetNewsWire in weeks.So, when I decided I was going to start blogging regularly, I wanted to make it easy for me to do so. This is the workflow I worked out:

I set up a blog on blogspot, and then linked it to my site (which I edit with RapidWeaver) with RapidBlog from Loghound.com. Then I used the “Email & Mobile” menu of the Settings tab of the blogspot dashboard to set up an email address, and set it to “Save emails as draft posts”. Then I added that email address to my Contacts app with the name “Blog Fodder”.Now, when I see something in Reeder I might want to blog about, I hit the action button, “email link”, and send it to my blog address. Then, I can edit it (as I’m doing now) as a draft with BlogPress on my iPad or iPhone, and when I have some time with my Mac, then I can sync and publish it to my blog with RapidBlog.Granted, it’s a little Rube Goldberg, but it makes it easy for me to capture ideas whenever they occur to me, blog during my unproductive time, and publish quickly at my leisure.Time will tell if it’s easy enough that I manage to stick with it.

Blog On

So I read this great article on why I should be blogging. So I decided I should start blogging.So here I am blogging :).Now, to be (at least partially) a programming blog, I need to be able to post code. I was playing with the High-Light plug-in for Rapid Weaver last year when I was playing with this blog the first time, but it doesn’t do Objective-C (at least not well - and Objective-C is what I’ll probably blog about the most), so I went hunting, and found highlight and used the installer from here to get it running on my Mac.So I’m grabbing the code, dumping it into TextMate, reformatting it, and using Opt-Cmd-R to run it through this script:1#!/bin/sh 2 3/usr /local/bin /highlight
-H -W -J 85 -l -f –enclose -pre \