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I set the alarm for 05:30 this morning and when it went off I was tempted to ignore it and sleep more. I had the self-discipline to get up anyway, shower, and then dress for a bike ride. When I was ready to go the watch told me “sunrise in 10 minutes” and I set off then.

On the way to Nyon I was beeped by a car for not using the cycle lane. There was no traffic, and if I had used the cycle lane then either I would have been forced to stop as the car passed me, due to losing my priority. That’s why I stuck to road. I was at over 30 kilometres per hour in a town, and since there was no traffic the car had no reason to beep me.

Two days in a row I participated in activities that pushed me physically. On sunday it was a 60km ride with 900m of climbing and a 25km/h wind and the next day it was a 9.4km walk which is pushing my endurance further than usual. I found myself thinking that I should participate in hikes because hikes are easy. I’m used to walking. Walking and hiking were my specialities.

Regular Challenges

By cycling on Sunday, despite the wind, and running on Monday despite the fatigue I pushed myself, and I remained true to my word. I saw on Whatsapp that the group that organises sedentary activities were complaining about no-shows in activities that involve sitting, drinking and talking.

Yesterday before the ride I could hear the wind playing with the shutter slats. I could also hear it against the combes, or roof, if you prefer that word. I looked outside and I could see that the wind was moving branches around. I also looked at the temperature and thought “Do I really want to go for a bike ride in these conditions?” Of course, as this was a group ride I did.

For two days I have been migrating my blog from Hugo to Eleventy via the markdown pages, and the photos via Ghost Export for Wordpress. In the process I achieved a goal, and then AI broke things, so I achieved them again, and then AI broke them again.

The favourite thing for Ai, and Gemini, in particular to break was the logic that took the markdown titles, matched them to a json file, and then helped 11ty marry the photo with the correct post. When it worked it was brilliant, but when it broke I would spend half a day trying to fix it. By the third time this happened I decided to ask Gemini to help me write a script to hard code the image path straight into markdown pages.

Every day I spend one to two hours thinking about what to write for my blog. Yesterday I noticed that Wordpress wants to get AI to draft the first version of posts using the AI model of our choice, as long as it’s American, and take away the hours of blank page syndrome.

If you’re working towards a deadline, and you’re writing for work, that might make life easier, but it might also make blogging less niche, less interesting, and more kitsch.

I currently use Hugo as a static blog. Before using Hugo I had tried with 11ty and failed because I couldn’t find documentation that suited my contextual understanding. It’s after a lot of trial and error that I eventually chose to experiment with, and then stick with Hugo since 2024 or earlier.

The reason for this is that once I found the tools to migrate from Wordpress to markdown, suited to Hugo, and found a theme that worked, I could blog with relative ease.

Recently I have been playing with rsync a lot. In the process of synching source A to B, as well as synching between machines I have grown familiar with how it works. It is for this reason that the move from using ftp for rsync to update the static part of the website began to make sense.

When I write a blog post I update wordpress with the markdown from the static blog post and then I run hugo to prepare the static site. I then used Filezilla to upload the changed files.

Ghost looks clean and elegant compared to WordPress but with one serious hurdle, price. Hosting solutions for Ghost range from 13-16 USD per month, which is huge compared to “free” for wordpress, but also in regards to the volume of traffic our blogs get. Is it worth spending 15 CHF per month for a blog that no one reads?

Full Ghost Clone of This Blog

Two days ago I was playing with Ghost locally. I tried to export my blog to ghost via the full export tool, failed, and then tried again via the JSON tool and this time I had success. I then instantiated an instance on the laptop I’m blogging from, before importing the json file.

For years I thought, “I want a smaller kettle so I can boil enough for a cup of tea or to make coffee, without throwing out two thirds to three quarters of the water I boiled. For years I thought that getting a smaller kettle was a waste of money, as they are often more expensive than larger ones. That is, until a certain person was elected for a second time and that nation showed real hatred towards the entire world.

Internet coelacanths like @documentally remember a different era. We remember internet video communities in the early days of Seesmic and Qik. Seesmic was a video instant messaging platform. We could either post disconnected videos about anything, or we could reply to each other and have converssations. KDFA had “Le Bar est ouvert”, Documentally had the English language equivalent. We had conversations on a daily basis.

Every week, if I remember the frequency correctly we had Seesmix, a summary of the top videos either from that day or that week. The conversation was strong. We had the “London” group, we had the Francofous/French group and more.