blogmonster

The low-carb healthy alternative

What is this?

After spending some time getting used to Obsidian and the Zettelkasten/slip-box method, I realized just how much mental energy I end up wasting on ideas and processes that are quickly forgotten about, after their intrigue or usefulness fades or becomes irrelevant. This blog is an attempt to clean up and publish some of my more complete musings into a format that might be interesting or helpful to someone—perhaps future me.

The information here is not guaranteed to be correct or inoffensive. I can only speak my own observations and experiences. Additionally, files in /notes are bare Zettelkasten-style notes pulled from my Obsidian vault. They are included here as supporting documents for the main articles, or just because I thought them interesting, and won’t be as polished as the rest of the content.

This is a living blog

Following the idea that this is just a bundle of musings, I may update pages at a whim. The original publish date and latest edit date are added to documents as tags. I may add or remove pages as I see fit. You don’t control me.

Social media is equivalent to the rotting of society’s collective brain. No thanks. And if the plan is to write to and for myself, with no other expectations of an audience, why would I use an inferior, cloud-hosted, privacy-invasive tool, owned by one of many multinational billion dollar megacorporations? I may expound on this later. ideas/blog

Why a self-hosted site and not a cloud provider like Blogger (RIP Blogspot), Medium, WordPress, or even Obsidian Publish?

I believe self-proprietorship is an important thing to express, especially in today’s minefield of data breaches and information brokerage. ideas/blog
Also, I’m cheap and I like being in control. ideas/blog
Also, I just think software is cool. ideas/blog

How did you set this site up?

I wrote about my setup here.

Yes, it is that simple.

ObsidianHtml is honestly not that well put together a project, and I think it has many faults (I even addressed a few) but for what it is, it is incredibly earnest and straightforward. I’m happy it exists and happy to use and contribute to it. Maybe I’ll fork it some day and fix the issues I have with it.

That background is cool, can I have it?

Absolutely. I use Unsplash as an image source, and images there are all available under the mostly permissible Unsplash license.

I have long respected Michael Cho and the Unsplash team, though their controversial (and potentially illegal) switch to the Unsplash license from CC0 and their sale to Getty Images were certainly reason for worry. Still, I am just a consumer and not a photographer, and see Unsplash as a relaxed platform to enjoy visual creativity. As long as that continues, I don’t have any tangible complaints. That is to say, I don’t have a dog in that fight.

I have a script running every hour to query the API (no source.unsplash.com here) and update image links. You can find attribution on my homepage.