This is my entry for AuguStory, a blogging challenge from Robert Birming to tell the story of your blog.
Once upon a time, Newsonaut was called Newsloops. The name was a mashup of news and Kamloops, reflecting my frequent commentary on local news for the newspaper where I worked.
The internet was still new-ish back in 2010, but we could see it was coming for our lunch. One of our strategies was to embrace it, doing anything we could think of that would bring us into the digital age. And for me, that included a blog.
About a year later, I changed the name to Newsonaut. I’m a long-time fan of science fiction and I wanted to take my writing beyond the local news.
Despite our best efforts, Google and Facebook starved the paper of ad revenue and it shut down in January 2014. I carried on writing for a couple of years — determined that journalism would in some way continue to be my occupation.
That fell by the wayside, though, as I accepted my new role as web developer for the local university. My focus shifted and I wrote far less often.
My blog never went away, though, and now, in retirement, it has found a new life as I rediscover writing for pleasure.
I’m back to writing for myself. It no longer matters if someone is paying me to do it or giving me some kind of recognition.
I’m not really sure that I care whether bots scrape Newsonaut and dump its contents into training grounds for large language models.
In fact, I kind of hope they do. There is nothing sacred on this site. If it gets chewed up and spat out into the primordial soup of the Internet, then so much the better.
Maybe my permuted content will slightly improve the response that someone, somewhere gets from an AI chat. I’m pretty sure any scrapings from Newsonaut would be accurate and possibly, at times, entertaining.
So welcome, bots. I embrace the slopiverse.
Addendum: OK, so they took it all long ago without my consent. A man can dream of freedom, can’t he?
This marks my 43rd post of the year, which is one more than the 42 I had in 2020. My next goal is to surpass the 64 posts I had in 2014. My best ever was 169 in 2011. In those days, though, it was more like a job. Now, writing has become one of the great pleasures of my life. You can see a graph of my progress on the Explore page.
On the one hand, there are plenty of HTML entities that can be used as icons on your blog. On the other hand, just try finding them!
I wrote about this recently when I pointed out that there is indeed unicode for the magnifying glass commonly used for search. It’s just not called that.
There are others like that. For example, a bulleted list icon that could be used to represent categories does exist, but it’s the mathematical symbol for colon equals. Another example would the hamburger menu. It’s there, too, but you need to know it’s the I Ching trigram for heaven.
So anyway, I rounded up a bunch of them and made a mini site called Font Lonesome. So called because you can use them all by their lonesome without a third-party service.
I use HTML entities exclusively for icons on Newsonaut, and so far it has worked well for me. It’s also kind of a fun challenge.
Over at thriftmac, though, I need a variety of icons to represent the app categories. For that, I turn to Font Awesome, which has a good selection of free icons.
Edit: I had to make a few changes after discovering some of them render as emojis in Safari. D'oh!
Blaugust is upon us, an annual challenge to set goals for the number of times you post in a month. Top prize goes to those how publish every day during August, but even five times will win you a bronze award.
This is the first time I have heard of Blaugust, but a few years ago I took it upon myself to have a sort of Blogtober. In October 2020, I posted every day — twice on one day — for a total of 32 posts.
It was an impressive feat, but what came next was not at all impressive. In November, I dropped to three and in December, I only had one.
In the following years, my output was meagre: 10, 6, 8, 15, 25. It wasn’t until this year that things started picking up again. What changed? I found indie web.
I have become more involved in 32-Bit Café and Bubbles, both of which give my posts more visibility and both of which allow me to feel engaged and connected.
I’m not getting a lot more views for Newsonaut, but knowing even a few people might be reading my stuff is inspiration enough to keep going.
So far this year, I have posted 40 articles. At this rate, I will easily surpass my total of 42 for 2020 — the year of Blogtober.
I’m pretty sure I won’t be posting every day during Blaugust, but I do wish the best for those who take part. It might be the inspiration you need to find a rhythm.
My only advice would be to go easy on yourself. Even a bronze award would be awesome.
While looking for something else, I came across a folder on my Mac called “free for X”. In it were a bunch of plain text HTML files which together made up a Mac freeware website that was the predecessor to thriftmac.
So I uploaded it to a server, opened the home page and sure enough there it was — an entire website from over 20 years ago still fully functional. The links to outside websites mostly don’t work, but that’s on them.
So, yes, proof that plain text not tied to an app does stand the test of time. This is especially true if you keep the files safe and sound on your own computer.
Looking back on it, the main thing I would have done differently today would be to use server-side includes for the head section and the navigation. On the other hand, I was using BBEdit, which has multi-file search and replace, so I might have been content with that method.
I don’t think I knew about Emmet back then, but it definitely would have come in handy for marking up lists and paragraphs.
I notice that I also availed myself of a third-party service for search. All I had to do was sign up and paste in the provided script. Somehow this survivor from a bygone era — Free Find — is still in business.
This points to a big advantage of hand coding — lots of flexibility. I used an editor called FeedMe to create my own XML for an RSS feed.
What we now know as static site generators didn’t exist back then. If the site had grown much larger with lots of linking, an SSG might have been helpful. For a site this size, though, it would have been overkill.
Markdown would have been fairly new at the time, although similar systems have existed since the early ’90s. I’m pretty sure my attitude then, as now, would have been that I don’t need it.
The HTML, as you can see by clicking on the badge in the sidebar, validates with only two errors. The images don’t have an alt. I’m not sure why I didn’t put them in, considering they would have been required even in those days. It seems to have taken me a while to come around to the idea that they are indeed useful.
The button for the validator contains the site’s former URL, which was free space provided by Shaw, my internet service provider at the time. I didn’t have to pay anything extra to have my own website — a big incentive for me to get started on learning to code for the web.
The CSS for the site shows some interesting choices. To create a two-column layout, I made the left div 67% wide and floated it to the left. The leftover space was the right column. For desktop this was fine. I didn’t worry about phones back then.
The navigation is a bulleted list with the bullets removed and replaced by a 1 em border on the left, highlighted as yellow if it is the active page.
At the bottom of the style sheet is a class called “greek”. I can’t find any reference to it in the HTML, and so it will forever remain a mystery.
Katrina Evans has started a pixel club based on little windows. I’m an old dog willing to learn new tricks so I headed over to Piskel and gave it a shot using one of Katrina’s window templates.
I decided to acknowledge wildfire season with a sunrise in the smoke. An orange orb in the grey was an easy start for a beginner.
More often, I have a nice view of rivers, mountains and clear blue skies. If I get better at pixel art, I’ll try to show those instead.
Edit: Katrina warned me they can be addictive, and sure enough I now have an animated gif of the Newsonaut rocket taking off.
This is not a problem for me because I mostly borrow books from the library with an app called Libby. The library system where I live has a great selection. If a book is popular and hard to get, I put in a hold even if it means waiting months. There are plenty of other books to read in the meantime.
Sometimes, I download an out-of-copyright book from Standard Ebooks. These books are carefully edited and nicely presented. You can get many hours of good reading from Agatha Christie alone.
If I buy a book, I usually buy a used paper book and, when I’m done, I put it in our little free library for someone else to enjoy. There’s really no reason to keep it, so why not pass it along?
I do occasionally buy a new book, but again it will be a paper version and only if it’s a book I think I might read more than once, or use as a reference. I’ve got my eye on Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji for this reason.
But what about Amazon exclusives? I would rather be dipped in the Amazon River with a swarm of piranha fish.
A post by Adam Newbold about how to ensure your website is portable had me thinking about how I sometimes do exactly what he advocates — upload HTML files to a server.
The idea is that you always have a copy of the site on your computer. So if the host shuts down for some reason, you can upload it to to a different server.
I do this for a website I created for the local tai chi club that consists of only six pages. Why add the complexity of a platform just for that?
But here’s the thing. You have to learn HTML. Adam insists that it’s easy, but I know a lot of people are going to nope right out at the thought of any kind of coding.
For those people, I suggest markdown. This is a system of marking up text for the web that hides the code. Instead, you use asterisks, hash marks, dashes and underscores.
If you want a bulleted list, for example, you put a dash in front of each item.
You don’t even have to remember that much, because it’s all covered in the apps under their Format menu.
A good app start with on the Mac is called MacDown, which is totally free. A new document gives you markdown on the left and formatted text on the right.
(Sorry, I don’t know of a free split-screen equivalent for Windows or Linux. Send me email if you have a suggestion.)
When you have your page looking the way you want, go to File > Export > HTML... And be sure to uncheck the box for Include styles. You want plain HTML. When you’ve learned CSS, you can add your own styles.
Once you have the export done, you can upload it to the server. If it’s the main or home page, make sure to change the file name to index.html.
Yes, that’s all it takes to have your own web page.
Still, you should at least gradually learn HTML. Take a look at the exported file and see if you can figure out how the tags work. The paragraphs, for example, all have <p> tags. There — you’ve learned your first HTML.
