Category: blog

It has been quiet here for too long. I can’t believe it has been over a month and a half since I last posted here. Remember when I was posting just about every day? What happened? For one thing, things have gotten increasingly busy for me. Our kids are getting older, and they are engaged in countless activities that only the most careful tracking on our calendar can keep up with. There are a constant stream of drop-offs and pick-ups. There is homework to help with. (I had to drudge up geometric proofs from the basement of my memory recently.) And of course, there is the day job that seems to keep me increasingly busy.

All of these are excuses, of course, but at the end of the day, I often find myself mentally drained, a situation that makes writing difficult. Even so, I miss writing here, and I’ve been looking for ways to get back into it. I keep telling myself that I’ll start up again in 2024, but that is one of those clever delaying tactics that reminds me of my teenager’s response to requests: “I’ll do it a little later.” Why wait? Why not get started now?

And so here I am, providing a brief update, but also a ray of hope. I have a vague plan at the moment. The idea is to get back to posting at least once a week here. Start small. If the past provides a roadmap in this regard, once I get started, I find that that the act of writing encourages more writing. For now, I’m keeping things simple and aiming for a post a week. I’m not exactly sure what I’ll write about first, but I have been keeping a list of ideas and so I may work off that.

In any case, for those who have stuck around, despite my long recent absence, I appreciate you, and you can look forward to new writing very soon.

Recently, I was notified that I passed my 14th anniversary on WordPress, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to give WordPress a plug here.

I switched to WordPress sometime in late 2008 or early 2009 (I can’t recall exactly at the moment, and I’m in a rush so I’m not going to look it up). This means that my use of WordPress pre-dates the birth of all my kids, the oldest of which will be 14 later this year.

I also believe that WordPress is the longest running software and service that I have consistently used. I’ve been using it for 14+ years. This blog is more than 17 years old. Prior to WordPress, the blog was hosted on LiveJournal (remember that!) and I like WordPress much more. My use of WordPress has outlasted just about every other service I’ve used (save, perhaps Gmail). I was using WordPress when I discovered Evernote, and I was still using WordPress when I finally gave up Evernote last year.

For the first 12 years that I used WordPress, I used a self-installed version of WordPress. But after a dozen years of doing it all myself, I decided to migrate from my self-installed instance to WordPress.com’s hosting service. It was a very good migration and everything about my experience with WordPress has improved since I began using their full-service hosting. (For the record, I use their Business Plan.)

All of this should be a testament to how useful their service has been for me over the years. Moreover, on the very rare instances that I’ve had an issue, their technical support has jumped (sometimes before I even knew there was an issue) to fix the problem quickly. WordPress has been just about the most functionally useful and reliable service that I use on a regular basis, and I heartily recommend the service for anyone looking to host a blog.

(P.S.: In case you are wondering, no one asked me to write this post. I am in no way compensated by WordPress. I wrote it, as I’ve written previous versions, because I use WordPress regularly and I really do think it is an outstanding service.)

Written on 17 January 2023.

I am on vacation with the family, but I wanted to check-in quickly to let you know that posting should resume here as planned once I am back from vacation. Next week I’ll have a post on some of my early progress on the automation I talked about in my goals post. This one will also include some experimenting with ChatGPT that I’ve done along the way. I’ll also have a post on our vacation, as well as the usual things you’ve come expect here. I’m also working on an essay or two, which I talked about in The Essayist. In the meantime, if you are looking for something to read, check out my best reads from 2022, or some of the best things I read online in 2022.

Meanwhile, I am enjoying vacation with the family. The weather has been fantastic and we are all having a blast. It is a break that we all needed. I can always tell when I am enjoying a vacation when I forget what day of the week it is–when everyday feels like a weekend. I had to check just now to see that it was Wednesday.

Happy Wednesday, everyone! And if I haven’t already said so, Happy New Year!

Written on 4 January 2023.

It has been quiet here on the blog for a few week, but that’s because things have been busy lately. I figured I’d jump in here to say that, yes, there are more posts coming, and yes, I am working on getting back to a regular rhythm. Here are a few things that have been keeping me busy lately, all of which I’ll be writing about more in the near future:

1. A few people may have noticed that my list of books I’ve read since 1996 has changed. Clicking the link takes you to a different site: notes.jtrwriter.com. What’s that all about? Well, I occasionally get questions about the books I read, like if I have any notes or summaries I’ve written. At the same time, I’ve been wanting to automate my reading lists, as well as capture my entire book collection in more detail than I have done so in the past. And while I’m at it, I want to include all of my reading-related notes. To do this, I am using Obsidian. I’ll have much more to say on this in future posts, but the pages I’ve posted to notes.jtrwriter.com, including my reading lists, are just the beginning. (And for those who are wondering, I am using Obsidian Publish to generate the pages there). In addition, if you are interested in what I am reading or writing at any given time, you can check out my “now” page there. Stay-tuned.
2. I have been writing fiction every day. I’ve found that, given the time I have available in day, it is difficult for me to work on a story and write a blog post. I recently revamped my morning routine–something I’ll be writing about soon–and have been trying to see if I can find a way to fit both blog writing and fiction writing into my routine. I have been prioritizing the fiction writing for now. More on this coming soon.
3. My random article reading at breakfast has been going well. I like not having that decision to make, and also look forward to whatever article might pop up for that morning. I’ve been posting these on Twitter each morning, and now that I’ve gotten into the flow of it, I’ll have more to say about that soon as well.

I’ve have other things to write about as well, including something on bats (the mammals), and something else on… well, you’ll just have to wait to find out.

I just wanted to pop in to make sure you knew that I was still alive and well, and plugging away, and that I will be back here posting shortly. In the meantime, while I’ve given up Facebook (and haven’t missed it!) I am active on Twitter just about every day, so you can always follow along on the days that I don’t post here, if you are so inclined.

Written on September 20, 2022.

I wanted to let you know about some upcoming changes to the blog schedule. Beginning on Tuesday, May 24, 2022, I am going to begin publishing posts here 3 days a week, instead of every day. You expect new post on Tuesdays, Thursday, and Sundays.

May 15th was the 500th consecutive day that I have published new posts here on the blog. There are two main reasons why I am giving up the streak and reverting to a lighter scheduled:

1. I have started to write fiction again. After more than five years of writer’s block it feels good to be writing again. This fiction writing has created a time conflict. I’ve found the time immediately after my morning walk, when the house is still quiet, to do this writing. It so happens that this was the time that I did the bulk of my blog writing. But the fiction writing is going well and I want to encourage that, so I’m sacrificing some of the blog writing time in its favor.
2. Writing for the blog nearly every day for the last 500 days is beginning to wear on me. I want it to remain fresh and fun. I want to avoid being too repetitive here. I think cutting back to publishing 3 posts a week will help with that. It gives me more breathing room and more time to think of ideas for things to write about.

This doesn’t mean that there won’t be the occasional Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or Saturday that a post will appear. But my goal will be to publish 3 posts a week to lighten my load to that I can focus a little more on some of my other writing.

During the 509 day streak, I wrote 621 posts for a total of 455,000 words. Not bad for a hobby!

I imagine there are many joyous readers right now who think that even three days a week too much of my writing to bear. Those readers can look forward to the days when I post nothing. Of course, every post I’ve ever written (more than 7,100 of them) is still here for people to read. A good starting point for those who want some variety is my curated index to the blog.

Just remember that Wednesday, May 25, 2022 will be the first day in 509 days that there will be no new post published. Don’t worry. There will be a new one on Thursday, and then Sunday, and then Tuesday, etc., etc.

As always, I’m grateful for all my readers here and I hope you’ll stick around, despite the lighter schedule.

Written on Thursday, May 19, 2022.

This morning, for a period of about two minutes, a blog post appeared here on the blog with the title, “Character Counts Commentaries.” Then it was gone. I thought an explanation was in order.

As regular readers know, I set a goal for myself this year to write two posts each day and thus build up a backlog of posts, scheduled in advance, in order to give me some breathing room for the days on which I was either too busy to write, or didn’t have the ideas or motivation to write. Overall, this has been going pretty well. As of today, I have posts scheduled in advance through April 18. Obviously, this means that I haven’t been writing two posts every day. If I had done from the start of the years, I’d already have posts scheduled through June. But I do pretty good, and 18 days of pre-scheduled posts is the most I have had at any point so far this year.

Regular readers also know that this is essentially a one-man operation (although I do have friendly eyes who keep on the lookout for typos in my posts). As such, I do pretty much everything here on my own. I write the posts, schedule the posts, set up the social media notifications for the posts. I do this among the usual chaos of busy days filled with the needs of three kids, my wife, and, of course, my fulltime day job. Mistakes are bound to happen, and this morning, for the first time this year, one did.

Without knowing it, you see, I’d scheduled two posts to go out at 8 am this morning. The intended post for today, Field Notes “Signs of Spring” Edition Has Arrived, was written and scheduled back on March 19, almost 2 weeks ago. The second post–the one that appeared briefly, and then disappeared–was called “Character Counts Commentaries.” This one was written on March 21 and was supposed to be scheduled for April 1. Instead, I accidentally scheduled it for today.

I could have left them both there, but when two posts come out at the exact same time, I find they compete with one another for attention. So I pulled the second post, shifted it to tomorrow, and put some notices up on social media briefly explaining what happened. It was actually a little more work than that. I had to shift every future post forward by one day to avoid “double-posting” again.

Those readers who subscribe to the blog get my posts in email at 8 am Eastern time, each morning. Those lucky subscribers would have gotten two emails this morning, and thus, have a preview of tomorrow’s post.

In way, there is a silver lining to this. It gives me a chance to explain something about the posts that will come out over the next three days. As I said, the title of tomorrow’s post is “Character Counts Commentaries” and it is the first of a 3-part series on radio and radio programs that I have enjoyed over the years.

You can look forward to the first post in the series tomorrow morning at the usual time. And for those of you who have already read it in the email notification–no spoilers, please! 😉

Written on March 31, 2022.

If anyone happened to notice the blog down earlier today, I confirm that it was, in fact, down. It went offline around 10:45am ET and was back online about 10 minutes later. I don’t know the cause, but I was going to check with WordPress on it. This was the first outage I’ve experienced since I moved the site to WordPress hosting early last summer.

I didn’t see any major outages reported so it seems like it was just a hiccup. I only mention it here in case anyone was trying to access the blog during that 10-minute window, and was having problems doing so. Things have been running smoothly since. Carry on!

Written on March 3, 2022.

Way back in 2021, I set a goal of publishing at least one blog post every day for a year. This was the norm for me for many years, but the few years prior to 2021 had seen a sharp decline in my post frequency. On December 31, 2021, I made my goal. I published at least one post every day and over the course of 365 days, ended up making 454 posts.

In 2022 I upped my game a little. I’m continuing my effort to publish at least one post each day, but I decided to try to write two posts every day. This builds up a nice little backlog of scheduled posts and helps take the pressure off those days when I am too busy to write. That’s working out pretty well so far.

It just so happened that when I woke up this morning, letting my brain wander, I realized that the 365 days of 2021 plus the 31 days in January 2022 that I’ve continued to post, plus the first four days in February 2022, including today, adds up to 400 consecutive days of publishing blog posts. And I thought I’d celebrate that fact by writing one more post to note it here. Last year, I also passed 7,000 posts over the 16+ year life of the blog, and am closing in on 7,100.

Incidentally, the traffic on the blog has been steadily creeping back up. In its peak, between 2013-16, I was averaging between 3,000 – 4,000 views per day. After 2016, when I wasn’t writing as much, the traffic began to fade and eventually dwindled to the low 100s per day. Posting every day last year has brought the numbers back up, not to their previous heights yet, but over the last few weeks I’m seeing average daily stats above 1,000 views per day again. I’m delighted to have so many folks back reading the blog again. It encourages me to write more.

And speaking of writing more, I still have my regular posts to write today. You won’t see them until at least after Valentine’s Day, but rest assured I am working on them!

Written on February 4, 2022.

Since I have started writing two posts a day, I have been getting ahead of myself. Today, for instance, is January 20, 2022, and the two posts I wrote today are now scheduled for January 29 and January 30 respectively. Between now and then, every day is already scheduled, and each day I write two posts extends this lead by another day.

Since I often write about things that are happening around the time that I write my posts, this creates something of a problem. If I refer to, say, the fact that reddit is down at the moment in a post I wrote today but that won’t be published for 9 more days, there is something of a disconnect.

To help reduce that confusion, you will begin to notice a dateline at the bottom of my posts. The dateline will simply read something like: “Written on January 20, 2022.” It will be in an smaller font with a yellow background to call it out. When reading a postl you can always refer to the dateline to see when it was actually written, as opposed to when it was published.

I just wanted to call this to your attention so you know why you see these datelines when they start appearing. And just in case it isn’t clear what they will look like, I’ve included one on this post.

Written on January 20, 2022.

We are just about halfway through the final week of our vacation, and we are spending this week at Walt Disney World. I’ve have had posts scheduled through much of my vacation and have been checking in for comments and things periodically, but this week, I’ve been mostly offline enjoying time with the family.

Also a reminder that there is no Practically Paperless post this week. They will be back next week.

I just wanted to check in and wish everyone a Happy New Year. I’ll be back next week with more-or-less regular blogging schedule and interactions. See you then!