# The Fallow Mind Garden ## Introduction What's that word...the word for a plot of land that has potential for a great garden, or something that has some potential but is mostly left undeveloped? Oh, yeah...*fallow*. Maybe that would be a good name for the new iteration of my personal website - the one I've been meaning to make. I've had "make a new website" energy, growing in intensity for the past few months. Several times, though, I've found myself sitting down and staring at a blank screen and wondering if, at my age, I even have anything to say anymore. > [!NOTE] Nihilism > None of the good nihilism blogs last more than a couple of entries --- ## About This Site In the past, I maintained a bunch of different web presences for myself - starting with static sites that grew into CMS-driven blogs, moving through homepages and landers on various social platforms. Different flavors of the web rose and fell. We all ultimately decided to give up on the open web and surrender all our shit to a handful of overlords, and I took part in that as well (albeit to an ever-shrinking extent). I've never had a web presence that drew much interest outside of an entry here and there, and I’ve always been ok with that. Over the years it may have been that absence of engagement that has made everything - blogs, socials, whatever - feel disposable to me. It’s always easy enough to stop talking when nobody’s listening. So here’s the newest iteration of my *“Mind Garden”* (n.b., that term's a little cringy). In the past, my *Mind Gardens* have all gone untended and fallow after a while. Will this one last more than a few entries? My big idea is that if I build out this one so that publishing is as frictionless as possible, maybe I'll stay with it longer. ### Background and Inspiration Recently, The Verge's Nilay Patel published an editorial-flavored podcast called "[The People do not Long for Automation](https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-backlash-databases-automation)," and it got me thinking about my frequent and fervent wish for a return to the glory days of Web 1.0. Back in the 90s, I started out making websites in a hard-to-imagine time before there were any widely available content management systems. Hand-coded everything. Tables for layout. Bizarre workarounds to accommodate MS Explorer's busted box model. Scripting in Perl via the good ol' cgi-bin. The emergence of this promising new spec called "Cascading Style Sheets." (*I wonder if that one'll stick?*) To that end, I decided that my new *~~Mind Garden~~* ***Junk Drawer*** should give me a chance to write stuff and publish it on static pages again, like God and Tim Berners-Lee intended. But what kind, and how? A couple of points of inspiration: I already mentioned The Verge. I enjoy David Pierce's *Installer* newsletter from that site. It's a nice little digest with some tidbits and a couple of things to explore. Another one that came right to my mind is the great-grandpa of all blogs - Dave Winer's [Scripting News](https://scripting.com). It's kind of an on-the-nose site to point out, but I've always liked his approach: microblogging, a few paragraphs here and there. And then, I have a couple of pieces of long-form brewing in my head and as early drafts. I'm promising myself I'll not just let them go fallow. ### Setup & Structure By design, Obsidian Publish is pretty vanilla, and I'm cool with that. Conceptually, what I'm working with is: - Microblogging type entries on monthly pages, one page per month, plain ol' reverse chronological. - Longer entries will follow, I'll do them on their own pages and link to them from the microblog. I'll work up some kind of nav when there are enough of them to keep track of. - The homepage will lead to the about page and will also contain the last 10 days of microblog entries To reduce the friction and actually keep me posting, I'm doing the microblog entries from within my daily journal pages in my primary obsidian vault. I have a section in my daily template for things I want to publish, and then I copy those things over to this site's vault. It's a pretty slick setup now that I've got it dialed in, and I've got to hand it to Claude Code for cooking up a script to do the legwork. It's a far more comprehensive script than I ever would've taken the time to do - one click copies and syncs my microblog entries, and rebuilds the index page. ### Visuals The css and dark/light color schemes of this site are custom jobs based off of [Dracula-official](https://draculatheme.com/) that I originally made to use in my personal vault. I punched up the dark mode colors from Dracula to suit my tastes, and hooked up a spiritually-similar light mode version based on a bunch of shades that I enjoy. Type is set in my 1st-choice all-around font: [Atkinson Hyperlegible](https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/). ### Obsidian & Obsidian Publish Nowadays, I spend a fair amount of time using Wordpress in my day job. I don’t feel like spending any more time in there, even if it would technically be better suited to the task at hand. Aside from not wanting to do something recreationally that feels like just another task I'd do at my day job, Matt Mullenweg’s antics this past year have left some kind of weird taste in my mouth. (*Maybe I’ll opine on that drama later.*) [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md) is among my favorite software, period. If you're unfamiliar: it's a notebook that stores all your entries on your own disc, as individual text files, and in an open format (markdown). But it's so much more than that. There's an ecosystem of plugins and a rabid fanbase who use obsidian as a jumping off point to build all sort of rad knowledge-management stuff. It's indispensable to me. I was actually in Obsidian, jotting some compare and contrast notes on various flat-file cms and non-wordpress publishing options, when the [Obsidian Publish](https://publish.obsidian.md) option occurred to me. After some hemming and hawing, I decided to set up this space using it. Reasons: I love the software, and I live in it during the day both at work and personally. I respect the Obsidian team's approach and mission and don’t mind throwing them a few bucks to hopefully help them support it. ### Roadmap 1. ~~create a roadmap for the site~~ *done!* 2. Look into federation. *I don't use or really plan to branch out into other socials (as of now, at least). But I do love the idea of the fediverse, even if I don't think it stands much of a chance in the post-corporatized internet.* 3. Keep writing. *I'm starting this site as a vehicle to press my brain back into writing on a regular basis. Now that I've totally perseverated on every last little detail about the site's underpinnings, time to do the needful.* 4. An RSS feed. *If only because I'm old and believe that no site is complete without one* 🤨 5. Write More. *Even if I don't publish it.* --- ## About Me I’m a standard-issue mid-50’s suburban dad type (actually, a grandpa). I run an IT department, spent a zillion years as an education consultant and web dev, among other things. As much as I despise broad stereotypes about entire generations of human beings, most of them about Gen X pertain to me. Also: my dogs are cool. ![[broccolini.jpeg|250]]![[hugo.jpeg|250]] ### Contact Contact me at [email protected], as the socials that I'm still on all have notifications turned off (as they should be) and I frequently go days without opening any of them. If you take the time to email me, I'll take the time to respond.