Thanks for the inspiration. I've tried starting this in various forms over the years and failed over and over. I guess I haven't fully committed to using my real name as a public persona for authorship. These are the reasons I think I've failed to blog:
Reasons:
1) Indecision - Wordpress has dependency issues that need to be kept up with, as I understand, and there's so many scripts targeting vulnerable packages...so it made sense to use a tech stack like Hugo, except...
2) Tech fatigue - I'm not a programmer, so I've ended up, more than five times, starting test sites with Gatsby or Hugo and gotten frustrated due to my limited JS knowledge, not having a mentor or being in a class (maybe I should revisit the programming class idea). I've been stuck in "dependency hell" and countless "PATH://" problems that resulted in me sudo'ing random commands from StackOverflow posts in the hope to brute force my way out of such problems, not fully cognizant of the risks associated with those issues. And then thinking back, "damn that Hugo site was quite nice, I'd like to revisit it", and when I do, feel completely lost and have to start from scratch again. The result is spending hours a day trying to get some minute design/CSS feature to work with constant tinkering, and that could have been actual writing time! Maybe ADHD is to blame...
3) Fear (of success) - I'm afraid that if I really dig deep into something I'm passionate about that is also controversial, and end up lucky enough to get some attention, that there will be people who will want to target me (i.e. writing letters to my company about how I'm a dangerous conspiracy theorist, etc.) Is this a legitimate fear or just paranoia?
4) Abuse - I'm concerned that if I spill out my soul, my hard work will be ingested by AI-driven tools such as GPT-3 - that the work will somehow lose value if it's published. But by not publishing, there's no exposure to these ideas, and it's basically pointless to not publish, because then no one can read your work and send you email about it.
Honestly, PG's site is design perfection in my view. Are those endnotes he uses doable in the Wordpress environment? Upon writing this, I realize it might be best to bite the bullet and go for a Wordpress.com type of site, seated on a custom domain. I don't know how to make it air-tight from a security perspective though, but maybe that's not as important as I'm thinking it is.
Reasons: 1) Indecision - Wordpress has dependency issues that need to be kept up with, as I understand, and there's so many scripts targeting vulnerable packages...so it made sense to use a tech stack like Hugo, except...
2) Tech fatigue - I'm not a programmer, so I've ended up, more than five times, starting test sites with Gatsby or Hugo and gotten frustrated due to my limited JS knowledge, not having a mentor or being in a class (maybe I should revisit the programming class idea). I've been stuck in "dependency hell" and countless "PATH://" problems that resulted in me sudo'ing random commands from StackOverflow posts in the hope to brute force my way out of such problems, not fully cognizant of the risks associated with those issues. And then thinking back, "damn that Hugo site was quite nice, I'd like to revisit it", and when I do, feel completely lost and have to start from scratch again. The result is spending hours a day trying to get some minute design/CSS feature to work with constant tinkering, and that could have been actual writing time! Maybe ADHD is to blame...
3) Fear (of success) - I'm afraid that if I really dig deep into something I'm passionate about that is also controversial, and end up lucky enough to get some attention, that there will be people who will want to target me (i.e. writing letters to my company about how I'm a dangerous conspiracy theorist, etc.) Is this a legitimate fear or just paranoia?
4) Abuse - I'm concerned that if I spill out my soul, my hard work will be ingested by AI-driven tools such as GPT-3 - that the work will somehow lose value if it's published. But by not publishing, there's no exposure to these ideas, and it's basically pointless to not publish, because then no one can read your work and send you email about it.
Honestly, PG's site is design perfection in my view. Are those endnotes he uses doable in the Wordpress environment? Upon writing this, I realize it might be best to bite the bullet and go for a Wordpress.com type of site, seated on a custom domain. I don't know how to make it air-tight from a security perspective though, but maybe that's not as important as I'm thinking it is.