Writing

Posthaven: Initial thoughts

I decided to give Posthaven a shot. You can view my extensive archive of (as of this writing) one post here: https://stanwjames.posthaven.com/

As a WordPress alternative, it strips blogging down to its basics. Is this good? Is this bad? Let’s make a list (or two)!

The Good

  • It’s very easy to use. I was able to jump in and have things set up in a few minutes.
  • It’s affordable! At $5 U.S. per month, it gives you up to 10 blogs (!) and as far as I can tell, you can only pay $5 per month, which means no year-long commitments. Want out after the first $5? Easy-peasy!
  • It has a few nice themes to get you started.
  • Editing posts is simple.
  • Adding images is easy, and it automatically lets you click to expand on them. Other embeds (YouTube, etc.) are also straightforward.
  • It has tags. I like tags. Maybe too much.
  • People can easily upvote, comment or subscribe to your blogs.
  • An RSS feed is available.

The Not So Good

  • A large part of the ease of use is found through its limited options. You get some basic formatting options, and that’s about it.
  • It only has five themes. If you want to create new ones, you can, but have to dive into HTML and CSS.
  • It has no spelling checker, and LanguageTool does not seem to work in its text editor. This led me to editing my one post about seven times as I kept finding typos. I make a lot of typos.
  • Images are not displayed in any kind of WYSIWYG way and they are sized based on the theme.
  • Its feature request page only has two features as “planned”: more themes and markdown support.

The site describes itself as a work in progress, so I don’t ding it too much for being a bit barebones. The UI is simple, but very easy to use, and it’s one of the few blogging platforms I’ve been able to jump into and get posts out of that both look good and are easy to write/edit.

Still, I’m not ready to go all-in. I must continue to experiment before leaving WordPress behind.

An important blogging tip

Do you want to join in the new retro fad of blogging like it’s 1999? I have an important tip to make the experience better for you and your readers, be they actual people, bots, AI or perhaps hyper-intelligent farm animals.

An example of a hyper-intelligent farm animal. Also, you should watch Gravity Falls.

That tip is:

Never remote-link to images

I made it big because it’s important. You see, back in the olden times of badly-compressed JPGs and animated GIFs that were the size of postage stamps, there was this unspoken assumption that the internet (or more specifically, the World Wide Web1LanguageTool is insisting I capitalize this and I’m not in the mood to argue part of it) was forever. If something made it to the net, it stayed there. Everyone had a site or a blog or a page under construction, and it was messy and great.

Then the big companies moved in and basically paved over all of that. The do-it-yourself sites like GeoCities, Angelfire and others went away. Blogrolls turned into quaint relics. Algorithms and feeds took their place. And really, it seems a lot of people are happy today to just scroll through slop content made by machines others.

But the lesson for you, the brave new blogger, is this: Despite the Internet Archive (bafflingly the victim of an attack as I type this), and other efforts to preserve the web days of yore, there’s a decent chance that the witty image you link to in a blog post will be gone in seven years. Or maybe even next week. It could get deleted by the host, or moved. Maybe the site it’s hosted on vanishes into the ether. The point is, when you remote-link to an image, you are gambling that the image will stay put. And I am here to tell you it will not.

See the image above? I found it doing a search for “super smart Waddles”. But the copy you’re looking at is one I’m hosting myself. As long as I maintain my blog, the image will remain. The pig stays, because I brought the pig home.

Blog smart, fellow writers!

Am I thinking about writing a novel again?

Photo by Leah Newhouse. Also an accurate reflection of how I type.

Sort of.

The AI debacle over at National Novel Writing Month prompted me to look at my collection of unfinished novels and ask myself, “Hey, would I like to start yet another novel and probably not finish it?”

And the answer is…maybe!

The nice part is that this time I’d be doing it outside NaNoWriMo, meaning I can work on whatever schedule I like, such as:

  • Write 500 words per day
  • Write 1,000 words per week
  • Think, sincerely, and at length, about one really great idea for a novel while writing absolutely nothing
  • Write 2,000 words, start over in a different piece of software, then repeat several times before being distracted by something else
  • Switch to longhand, write three pages, have my hand cramp up horribly and wonder what the hell I was thinking
  • Look, it would have been a great novel, OK?

I’ve got options, is what I’m saying. Let’s see what happens next!

The angry screeds are coming from inside the blog

UPDATE, September 27, 2024: Fixed some details. Also, here is a longish piece by Josh Collinsworth that covers the whole sorry affair in detail. The only thing missing is Mullenweg's announcement to give WP Engine a four-day "reprieve", written in the same churlish tone as everything else he's put out recently. I would not invite this guy to your next birthday party.

It seems that a dispute has erupted between WordPress and WP Engine, a company that makes use of WordPress in ways that the WordPress founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg apparently does not like. There are cease and desist letters, lawyers and all that involved now.

This has led to a couple of unusual entries in the normally quiet WordPress Events and News section of my blog’s dashboard, as seen below.

Clicking the links (you can’t click them in the image, sorry!) will lead to the WP founder saying mean things about WP Engine, even calling it a “cancer.” He had threatened to bad mouth WP Engine at a major public WP event (ironically sponsored in part by WP Engine) if WP engine didn’t share some of their sweet lucre with him through some vaguely defined licensing something-or-other that Matt appeared to have invented very recently. WP Engine asked for more time, Matt took that as no and the bad-mouthing took place). It’s ugly all around.

And what this person–the CEO and founder of WordPress–has done has made people start to question the actions of WordPress as an organization, and how much it can be trusted moving forward. It takes a long time to build a good reputation, but only moments to ruin one.

I was already revisiting my (ever)quest to move my blogging, and this is…helping. I’m not sure if that’s the outcome Matt Mullenweg was looking for.

I’m going to be rich!

See:

But (a little) more seriously, I’ve been looking at novel-writing software and there are a few trends I’ve noticed:

  • A lot of software has moved to the browser (kind of yucko).
  • Most software has a monthly or yearly subscription attached (definitely yucko).
  • No one really recommends Microsoft Word, but a few recommend Google Docs (??).
  • Most non-browser software seems to run on Windows or Mac, but rarely both.
  • Scrivener is the unicorn because it supports Windows, Mac and has a one-time purchase price. It even works on Linux if you are willing to fiddle a bit (no actual fiddle skills required).
  • There seems to be a split between software that is pretty and modern, and One Dude Who Knows How to Code But Uses UI by Caveman Design.
  • None of the “best of” lists I looked at offered anything for Linux. Sorry, Tux! This is mildly surprising, because novelWriter is open source software that runs on all three desktop platforms: Windows, macOS and Linux. I’m trying it out now and will have more on it soon™.

In reality, I probably have the best option already, the aforementioned unicorn of Scrivener. But I am still traumatized by how it munged my work, and it does not play nice with network drives or cloud services, and I’m not yet certain if I want to restrict my writing to one platform. Maybe I should.

Also, this is my way of saying I may start writing fiction again. Woo. Or at least woo-ish.

I write at the intersection of tragedy and farce

Not really. But it seems popular these days to be writing at or about the intersection of some thing and some other thing or things, and as I get older, I descend more into, “How do you do, fellow kids?” territory, wanting desperately to seem hip, cool, and relevant while being only a little of each.

Things I also write at the intersection of:

  • The street I live on and the one nearest it
  • Apple and why it’s so much fun taking shots at the company
  • Apples and pears, the eternal battle for snack fruit dominance
  • Technology and penguins
  • This and that

Have a favourite intersection you want me to write at? Let me know!

NaNoWriMo no-no: Weird messaging on AI

I have long-since given up on participating in National Novel Writing Month (and have no plans to take part this November), but it popped up recently for a reason I didn’t expect: The organization’s stance on AI (which they think is A-OK).

More to the point, they think rejecting AI outright is classist and ableist. You can read their (modified multiple times) statement here: What is NaNoWriMo’s position on Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

As I state in the title above, this seems like a weird stance to take and is probably insulting to the people NaNoWriMo thinks they are championing (and I’ve seen several posts from people in the target group on Mastodon saying just this). No one needs to use AI to write a novel, and I’d argue that no one should, especially for something like NaNoWriMo, where many participants are new writers just learning their way. Using the crutch of AI could easily lead them to writing worse fiction, reinforce bad habits and suck the soul from their work. It could impede them from finding their own voice by bumbling through and learning from their mistakes.

And this is all apart from the ethical arguments surrounding AI being largely or even mostly built on the theft of the work of others (sure, some AI companies are starting to make deals, but how will a writer possibly know if the AI they’re using is “clean” or not?)

I’ve toyed around with AI a few times on this blog, mostly as a kind of joke, because the results are usually awful, bland or blandly awful. I’ve stopped now because the energy costs make me feel bad about using it just to fart around.

Some have pointed out that NaNoWriMo might be beholden to its sponsors, as one of them has AI features–ProWritingAid–but they have been a sponsor since long before they adopted AI tools. Here I was going to point out that another sponsor, Ellipsus, has a very anti-AI stance, but…it looks like they pulled their sponsorship in the last day (statement here: We’re stepping down as a NaNoWriMo sponsor. Here’s why.)

I expect more fallout to continue, and it already seems like an opportunity for replacements for NaNoWriMo has begun–one is already in the works that I know of: https://writingmonth.org/.

Of course, none of this will stop anyone from trying to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. You don’t need a big website–or AI–you just need an idea, and a lot of dedication to see it through (and about 1–2 hours per day of free time, in my experience).

I’ll post more as the situation develops.

Also:

Blogging: On the other hand…

When I think about moving from WordPress to something perhaps simpler and easier to manage, it also occurs to me that since October 2023 I’ve not exactly struggled to post, but my output of roughly 2 posts per day has dipped to something like 1.1 posts per day. Maybe I don’t have enough to say anymore to warrant switching to another (paid) service.

Or maybe I’m just in a creative funk.

Or maybe I’m lazier than I used to be.

So many possibilities.

I will continue to ponder.

Meanwhile, here is a smart-looking cat1Yes, I’ve used this one before. Like I said, I’m lazy. I mean, I’m recycling and saving e-trees or something.:

Blogging and thinking about blogging (includes blogging)

I saw a link on Mastodon1aka the one social media platform I still use that led me to write.as, which is one of the blogging solutions I pondered when I was thinking a lot about moving away from WordPress. Then some things happened:

  • I got distracted (this happens a lot)
  • The easier route of just tolerating WordPress and doing nothing settled in and took root
  • Not to mention, I know WordPress quite well after using it for almost 20 (!) years, so there’s muscle memory and all that encouraging me to stay put

But as someone who hopefully isn’t just an AI scraping my blog for weirds and probably untrue things to add to the AI Slurry of Knowledge (SOK), you may have noticed I’ve also been engaged in something I call The Culling for the last few years. I can’t recall if I’ve ever fully explained what it is, but it’s pretty simple.

The Culling, explained

  1. Big corporations are generally bad
  2. Big tech corporations seem to be extra bad, in that, “You think YOU’RE bad? Hold my beer. Hold all of my beers” way.
  3. Growing increasingly disenchanted, while also experience things like subscription fatigue, I have begun The Culling. The Culling is meant to move me away from services and software offered by Big Tech™ and to use either free (possibly even FOSS) or paid options from smaller companies that still see their customers as humans and want to treat them fairly, a radical notion on the current interweb.

WordPress has made some dumb (IMO) moves regarding AI and are generally heading in a direction I don’t like. Also, the platform is bloated, creaking and there’s way more here than I need to just write inane things and post pictures on a daily basis to an audience of one to five people, of whom I count myself. Thus began the search for a replacement, which would also be part of The Culling.

And then lazy, too easy to do nothing, etc.

But now I’m looking again. I feel I’ve somehow managed to tap into one of those moments where I am invigorated for [x] period of time, and I am seizing it to move forward in several areas, one of which is this here blogging thing.

I will report back soon or soon-like.

“It felt like opening the front door at my birthday party to welcome in a group of iPads on wheels instead of people I like”

Today I came across this wonderfully horrifying blog post about someone using AI (an LLM1Large Language Model, or as I’ve seen some people call them, a very fancy parrot to be precise) to write an email to a friend. Why a friend would do this to another friend is a very good question, because it seems terrible and awful.

The post is filled with great lines, though, one of which forms the title of this blog post, which was generated by LTF2Less than Ten Fingers typing, which is the way I’ll always roll, I think technology.