Weekly Journal 171 - Blog Reset?

Blog Reset?

Last week I lamented the lack of progress on building a PKB, and this week I realize I have the same problem with migrating this blog to Hugo and building out a digital garden. After getting into this project, it has become apparent that getting Hugo to support both a blog and a digital garden will require some custom development. That isn’t a blocker in and of itself, but it does take time I’d rather spend on other projects. In this season of life, there are many things competing for my time and attention and I don’t always have time to work on my personal projects. Rather than spending that time building a custom blog theme that I would then I have to support, I’m thinking about wiping the slate clean and setting up a new blog using Pico.

I’ve tried Pico previously, but I decided to skip it at the time because I didn’t see any way to preserve existing links. After thinking about it some more, I’ve come to the conclusion that trying to preserve my old posts probably isn’t worth it. According to my anonymous stats, the posts that get the most traffic are ones I wrote years ago about BizTalk and .NET and are probably no longer relevant. I doubt I’ll ever write about those topics ever again, so I think it makes sense to get rid of that those posts in favor of having a system that reduces friction.

Over the next week or two, I plan on evaluating Pico again. Pico has both a blogging service and a site hosting service that I think could work for building a digital garden. My plan is to keep doing a weekly journal using the blog service, and creating a digital garden around some of my personal projects.

Bookmarks

I spent a little time looking at new bookmarking tools this past week, and I’m currently trying out Raindrop. So far it’s going well. I don’t love the mobile app, but the web app is pretty nice and it works well in a mobile browser. I took a look at Diigo and Pocket as well. Something seems off with Diigo. They have a link for an Android app, but apparently it’s no longer available in the Google App Store. That doesn’t fill me with confidence that Diigo is still being developed and supported. Pocket looks like it’s more interested in suggesting content than helping me organize my bookmarks. If I can find the time I would like to try setting up LinkAce locally and trying it out, but this is another thing I want to work without a lot of friction.

I also have some new ideas to try out for the PKB, but that’s potentially a topic for a future post.