Meta – Francis Cortez

I did 100 days and it was a good amount of time to figure out a bunch of things I shouldn’t do. I still want to nail down what I should be doing. I want to write. I want to improve as a writer. That means sharing some work. Maybe not all the crappy pages. Just some of them. We’ll see.

Anyway for the first 100 days I used Google Docs and Jekyll. I was familiar with Jekyll. I love using it for putting sites with some structure together. I saw that it could handle hundreds of posts. Paul Stamatiou has a Jekyll blog with thousands of posts. Ten years worth.

Now he writes great, very (very) in-depth posts every couple months. I think Jekyll is great for that. I also think it’s great for a custom photo blog like he has.

Jekyll sometimes made me feel more like Mr. Hyde. I would just want to post something then a couple of hours of HTML and CSS later…

So I installed WordPress. Something I realized about a lot of people I’m looking at whose path seems to make sense as a writer—they aren’t using Jekyll. Even Paul’s thousands of posts were converted from WordPress posts.

I want to write shorter pieces more frequently. (Taken to that extreme you’ve got Twitter.) Docs and Jekyll allowed me to separate writing from the code. But not always the publishing part. I’d need to finish things in Markdown. It’s too close to code. Keep me in a rich text editor.

I want to be able to go through the entire thing on my phone. (Without setting up a bunch of scripts.) Everyone likes the feeling of completing a post. I’ve had WordPress blogs in the past and there’s something to hitting “Post”. It’s more satisfying than running a deploy script.

While I was a little too optimistic thinking I’d avoid tinkering (trading Ruby for PHP and MySQL—all of which I know next to nothing about).

So here it is. Just another WordPress site. Hello world!

Two crappy pages to two (hundred) crappy pages. And 98 other posts in between. I want to have a place hold the 100 posts as I continue adding more to the site. This page has the posts in categories.

Japan Trip

I started the 100 days by posting twice and then getting behind by about 14 days to go on a trip to Japan with my girlfriend. The trip also gave me a good amount to write about.

Book Notes in parts

I wrote a couple posts as parts. The idea here was that I could write one-off notes as I went along. I was trying to do three posts with a single excerpt and more of my own commentary.

Book Notes

These are the full book notes I wrote for different books. The goal was usually to have single posts with five excerpts and commentary.

Writing

A lot of the things I wrote were about writing. And about blogging and this project itself. Navel gazing. Still, I think there’s value because it was at least a small step up from recalling the day’s events. And I’ve read and enjoyed plenty of other people writing about writing and blogging about blogging.

I wrote a couple posts as stray notes. The idea here was that I could write one-off notes as I went along.

Friday Links

Heavily inspired, mostly stolen from Tim Ferriss. I wanted a weekly post that was heavily structured so I wouldn’t have to think. Find four links and this would write itself.

A lot of times, these took the longest to write. The links I gathered were usually good to read through again and then I’d go read other stuff from the author and on and on. I guess a better description would be that these were the hardest to focus on.

I also think they’re a great place to start to get a sense of what topics I’m interested in.

Sunday Journal

I was writing about writing a little too much and it was seeping into every post. Toward the end I tried to be more conscious of this and moved these thoughts to journal posts.

I usually wrote about something I heard in a podcast. Major major navel gazing. When I do send out a newsletter, I suspect it’ll be some mix of Friday Links posts and Sunday Journal posts.

Design

When I started, I wanted to deliberately avoid writing about design. Then I wanted to do some design exercises to see how I could improve this blog before sharing it with others. Then I thought it’d be good to share that process and wrote a few posts.

In all that, I remembered I enjoy writing about design. It’s probably because writing about design process means I can create content by sketching or playing in Keynote instead of strictly writing.

Misc.

I wrote about other random things: running, things I’m using, podcast notes, meditation, food, and more.

Category: Meta

Thirty days of WordPress

100 Days, 100 Posts