Friday, 24th December, 2021
I was very close to buying Tinderbox last night. I know buying stuff at 11:30 pm is never a good idea. Even with the discount it’s still £175. I just can’t get over that. I’ve been watching more videos on it. The interface is still weird but I get it a bit more now. I’ve also downloaded the demo version and started messing about with it, just random stuff. I ordered the Tinderbox way as that had 25% off. Although maybe shouldn’t have bothered.
Obsidian live preview. This is what I wanted from the start. Now I’m looking at Obsidian again. It does have iOS apps which is nice…hmm. Ugh this is ridiculous - as I’m writing this I’m watching emacs videos. I should just play computer games and ignore all this. I’ve wasted a quiet morning by myself on pointlessness.
Okay, well what a fun christmas eve. One of the boys has a terrible cough and woke up the other and neither went back to sleep until 11pm.
Jack kindly shared his new 2022 daybook tinderbox file to demonstrate it to me. It’s definely a great tool and I’d like to own it, however, I think that for me to use it just to make a blog and a daily journal thing seems like a waste of money and learning effort. It would be good at it but it’s still overkill. I really like the way it can do daily page blogs though, with custom attributes that generates other html. That’s something which is missing from all (at least as far as I’ve seen) static blog generators. So even though I want it, I’m not going to buy it.
Occasionally I still think “fuck it, just buy it”.
Another factor that I realise is important to me is mobile access. iPad at a minimum, because I’m not going to buy a laptop, and actually I write a lot on my phone. Most of my DayOne entries are from my phone when watching the kids in the bath or waiting for something somewhere. So I’d end up writing stuff and then moving it across, or sorting out syncing between Apple notes or whatever.
Right now I’m using github.dev to just edit this file in my repo on my ipad and it’s great. This is not great on my phone, however, blog editing doesn’t need to be on my phone.
I actually opened up dynalist and made a new doc for my journal. It’s going to be single page, and it works nicely on iOS. It’s not a permanent place but I feel like a single page is going to be a good thing.
One of my potential projects for 2022 is making my own static site generator. Specifically tailored to daily notes like this site, and customisable attributes on nodes. I’m hoping to adopt an existing editor to do the writing (maybe Concord or even Drummer, but would be nice if it was something more portable (which maybe concord could be)). Making the text entry section is quite a bit more work, but perhaps that’s the only solution. I suppose emacs and ox-hugo thing may already be what I want, but I’d rather make it web based. I suppose it depends if I’m making it for me or for others to use, and by that I mean something people could use not just “here’s the code on github”. Writing and thinking about this makes me think “fuck it, buy Tinderbox, it basically does what you want and £170 vs many many evenings…”.
Came across this blog service again. It’s pretty comprehensive.
Merry Christmas Everyone! 🎄
