Getting Back Into Things

I’ve been traveling a lot over the last month. I’ve not been able to co-host (or attend!) the last two Homebrew Website Club Baltimore meetups. I’ve also completely neglected my old post-pact with co-host Marty. However, my travels are now finished and I’m super motivated to work on my site again.

I have lots of things to write about. During tonight’s meetup I decided that I wanted to archive some of my previous site’s content by creating posts. In doing this, I realized that I often start a series and then stop two or three posts into it. We’re going to be talking soon about our IndieWeb 2018 Commitments, and I already know that one of mine will be to write more!

Upcoming Posts

Part of my travels included heading to London for MozFest 2017. I spent the last six months working with a great team of people to wrangle the Web Literacy space. We reviewed, selected, and curated session proposals and then designed and executed the space experience for attendees. It was an amazing experience. I plan to write about this in greater detail now that I have enough distance (but not too much that I forget) from the event!

During my travels, particularly leading up to MozFest, I was listening a lot to Henry and Heidi, Henry Rollin’s and Heidi May’s podcast. Henry was discussing writing Get in the Van and how writing is hard, and that he needed to build enough discipline to write a bit each day, even if it was brief.

Get in the Van is one of my favorites, and if you haven’t listened to the Emmy winning audiobook, you should definitely check it out. One of the takeaways for me is that there are people who choose to get in the van and get things done. The other takeaway is that writing takes discipline. I have ideas about things I want to write, but now it’s time for me to actually get in the van and write, even if it’s brief.

Goals and Commitments

I suppose that this is a call to action and precursor to my commitments. Writing more, and utilizing the excellent Indieweb tools for posting status updates, quotes, and other things, is one of my main goals.

Another goal is to iron out my WordPress workflow. I’ve been reading a lot about best practices and modern WordPress development workflows, and I want to start running a local development environment where I make all of my non-database changes and then push those out to my live server. This will provide me with a local sandbox for tweaking my site while also providing me with version control via Git.

Overall I’m a bit saddened by my lack of writing over the last six plus months, but I’m excited to build my discipline and start actually getting in the Indieweb van.