New year, new blog

This is the inaugural post of a blog, which I intend to become a repository for various bits of flotsam and jetsam floating around inside my head. As I write this, it is the first day of 2025, and I have just been for one of my tri-weekly 3 mile runs (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays). Earlier this morning I deleted a previous blog that I used to run, and I am in the process of downloading all of my data for Facebook and the-site-formerly-known-as-Twitter, so that I can delete my profiles on those sites. I haven't used them for ages, and frankly I don't want to be associated with Mark Zuckerberg's fatuous Meta nonsense, or Elon Musk's Nazi hellhole any longer.

For quite some years now, I've had thoughts and ideas for pieces of writing and I've never actually done anything about them. Consequently, they have remained in my head, where they are a nuisance and make me generally miserable. My hope is that if I actually start writing things down then my head will clear and I will do a better job of the important things in life, namely engaging with family and friends.

The rules, then, are simple:

1. Try to write something, even if only a couple of sentences about what I had for tea, every day.
2. Over time, get all of the nonsense out of my head and into print.
3. Aim to keep it cheerful and interesting, although some of the topics may be neither.

There are also some additional constraints which I am imposing upon myself (note that I am a web developer by trade):

• The blog will use basic HTML with minimal styling - I am sick of pages that download masses of script and CSS. On this site, reading a blog post will involve a single network download. Inline CSS may be used tastefully, or for the purposes of accessibility.
• The actual posts will be written in a simplified version of Markdown, for which I have yet to write a parser! I figured I'd write my first post first, and then figure out how to convert it into HTML.
• There will be no explicit integration with social media. I may consider adding appropriate "meta" tags to pages e.g. for Dublin Core metadata.
• I will push myself to experiment with new techniques and ideas which may be relevant for work purposes. For example, in this post I'm trying out the idea of writing one sentence per line. I've seen this recommended for writing documentation because it facilitates moving things around and cleaner code diffs. I am also hoping that it will also make it easier to write the abovementioned parser...

So we'll see how this experiment goes. Maybe it will descend into solipsistic irrelevance, maybe I will find that I have something worthwhile to say. But anyway, as we say at the end of our internal "code review" calls at work - onward!

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