Blogging

Nine years! It has been that long since I posted. Personal life and work-priorities both conspired to the silence in /usr land, which I finally hope to correct. A lot has happened in the world in the last decade. Technology has moved on (and continues to accelerate), two presidencies have come and gone, climate change is real, and computers might soon become sentient [1]. And the topics I usually posted about: Emacs, the Mac, *Nix, Open Source, and programming, have all made great strides (not always for the better, I’m looking at you: macOS). And while I have been immersed in these transformations, and have things to say, I just never got around to actually writing. And with each passing year, procrastinating slowly changed into a nagging fear: is blogging still relevant these days? And with the overwhelming rise of social media, does the voice of a blogger even matter? ...

The latest beta of NetNewsWire (3.2b13) has removed the annoying advertisements that were a major distraction. Also, they have brought back the clipping feature - which is really one of the most useful functions for storing interesting RSS articles for reading later. However, the resurrected clippings do not sync with Google Reader, which cripples the function. In my usual use case scenario, I used to use the Newsgator online web interface to store long articles for reading later at leisure at home. Looks like this is not going to be possible. ...

Finally managed to move over the entries from the old site! Adieu X10Hosting. It was definitely NOT nice knowing you.

While setting up this site (which is based on Wordpress), I was evaluating a few offline blog editors, and came upon MarsEdit and Ecto - both of which seem to be well-accepted commercial blog editors in the Mac world. Both allow easy setup of the blog configurations, have a hassle-free configuration, and allow a mail-inbox like access to previous posts. My needs for the offline blogging tool are: Support Wordpress (obviously) Support formatting in Markdown (the default Wordpress formatting is atrocious). Note that you will need to enable Markdown syntax on your blog by using any of the plugins available for Wordpress. Provide easy access to prior posts Have a decent text editor built-in Provide at least a subset of my current editing muscle-memory However, I happen to be a Emacs fanatic, and perform majority of my day-to-day computing tasks in that tool (another post on this later). So I googled around a bit for the current state of blogging using Emacs, and voila! EmacsWiki pointed to the weblogger mode, which supports Wordpress, and also handles Markdown formatting easily with the markdown mode. And to top it off, the code is open-source, which means that I can tinker and change the functionality when needed. ...