Yes, it’s my third post with “Simplify, simplify” in the title; but, please, hear me out. I’m hoping for better luck this time

Simplify, simplify, maybe for real this time

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2022-05-21 17:00:06

Yes, it’s my third post with “Simplify, simplify” in the title; but, please, hear me out. I’m hoping for better luck this time than with its two predecessors—especially since, as I’ll explain at the end, this has nothing to do with my gyrations among various static site generators (SSGs).

A few weeks back, I mentioned my daily use of a feed-reader app—specifically, NetNewsWire—to read a lot of sites’ feeds. Most of the feeds I follow originate from the likely suspects for a geek like me: Hacker News, Ars Technica, several Mac-related sites, a few tech companies’ blogs, some subreddits, and the various GitHub release pages for several projects I use.

I also follow feeds from a small number of tech-savvy individuals who, as do I, write posts about whatever nerdy things happen to interest them at the time. It hasn’t been lost on me that some of these folks tend to write more frequently, and often more freely, than I’ve typically done since launching this site in September, 2018. They apparently don’t share my long-held thought that every post has to be like a mini-article—and, in my case, often not all that “mini.” Rather, they write posts of varying lengths which clearly are driven not by some sort of internal editorial calendar but, instead, a desire just to say something, to share information, and to do it immediately.

The closest I’ve come to this method, so far, has been in two series of posts: the “Mixed nuts” series I started in November, 2019, and the “Gems in the rough” series I began in December, 2020. The latter, with its more tech-oriented focus, is closer to what I’ve seen from those other bloggers; but, even “Gems in the rough” isn’t quite in that mold, since (a.) I have tried to avoid issuing multiple “Gems in the rough” posts too close together and, in a related vein, (b.) I’ll often hold a cool tip or otherwise important item until I feel it’s appropriate to put out another “Gems in the rough”—or, even more limiting, a larger piece with just one over-arching topic.