A blog about everything, by Jack Baty

D’ya ever grow weary of thinking about blogging and blogging software and blogging workflows and blogging culture? No? Me neither. Not normally, anyway, but it’s happening now. I’ve been having a blast testing Kev Quirk’s new blogging platform, Pure Blog. He’s done a great job of nailing the basics. It’s easy and fun to use. So fun, in fact, that I’ve been teetering on using it for this blog at baty.net. Sometimes I just want a CMS. ...

Remember when I said I wouldn’t change blogging platforms? It’s still (mostly) true. So far.

Alice on the couch I tend to write a few types of posts: daily journals, longer posts, short notes, and photo posts. No blogging tool I’ve used has done each of these well. The closest I have so far is daily.baty.net. This is a journal post using Pure Blog. This blog will probably be about blogging with Pure Blog most of the time, since it’s why I made it. Maybe don’t subscribe to RSS just yet :)

Just to be clear, I don’t have serious plans to migrate my main Baty.net (Hugo) blog to Pure Blog. That doesn’t mean I won’t explore the “But what if I converted baty.net to Pure Blog?” scenario. Things will be wonky while I tinker. Probably don’t link to anything here, since I’m almost certain the links will break. Some things I’ve noticed: Date formats in YAML are inconsistent with different SSGs. For example, Hugo wants date: 2026-02-05 05:29:52 -0500 and Pure Blog uses date: 2026-02-07 16:25 which throws an error in Hugo. Adding seconds to the date fixes it. Quoted strings in YAML front matter are optional. Many of my Hugo posts do quote the title: attribute using either single or double quotes. Would need to be removed, because in Pure Blog, those quotes are included as part of the title, etc. Same goes for tags: [“Tag1”,“Tag2”] vs [Tag1,Tag2].

Would like some specific/consistent markup element naming. For example, the post date is only identified by the time element on the post detail, but something else on the home page. Maybe name it something? Another example, I want the tags to be in a smaller font. They’re just a p element. I would like the page title to be a link (not underlined, though) I would like to override the copyright. Excerpts on home page should render markdown, yes? What’s the best way to deal with upgrades?

A day with family

I’m giving the Feishin music player a go on Linux. It’s full-featured and very Roon-like, but streams from my Navidrome instance. It’s an Electron app, which some people can’t stomach, but it doesn’t bother me much. It’s a minor ick to suffer for a music player I might actually enjoy using. If it turns out to be too much, then there are dozens of other options. I learned about Feishin from the post, The state of Linux music players in 2026, which was linked to here which was linked to by Andreas’ always interesting Link Dump.

Posting to the photo blog.

Why am I not making photos?

I like being able to create new Org mode tasks from anywhere, via a simple keyboard shortcut. This probably doesn’t justify a whole post, but here’s how I did it. Create a script at ~/.local/bin/orgcapture.sh Here’s the script: #!/bin/bash emacsclient -c -F '((name . "capture") (width . 80) (height . 34))' -e '(progn (org-capture) (delete-other-windows))' In my Emacs config, I have a hook that tidies up the new frame: (defun my/org-capture-finalize-hook () "Close frame after org-capture if it was opened for capture." (when (and (> (length (frame-list)) 1) ; More than one frame (frame-parameter nil 'client)) ; Frame created by emacsclient (delete-frame))) (add-hook 'org-capture-after-finalize-hook 'my/org-capture-finalize-hook) In KDE’s Settings, I added a new command in the Shortcuts settings that point to that script. I assigned it to F3. ...

I like being able to create new Org mode tasks from anywhere, via a simple keyboard shortcut. This probably doesn’t justify a whole post, but here’s how I did it. Create a script at ~/.local/bin/orgcapture.sh Here’s the script: #!/bin/bash emacsclient -c -F '((name . "capture") (width . 80) (height . 34))' -e '(progn (org-capture) (delete-other-windows))' In my Emacs config, I have a hook that tidies up the new frame: (defun my/org-capture-finalize-hook () "Close frame after org-capture if it was opened for capture." (when (and (> (length (frame-list)) 1) ; More than one frame (frame-parameter nil 'client)) ; Frame created by emacsclient (delete-frame))) (add-hook 'org-capture-after-finalize-hook 'my/org-capture-finalize-hook) In KDE’s Settings, I added a new command in the Shortcuts settings that point to that script. I assigned it to F3. ...

Linux is nice so I’m using that today.

I finally started to become comfortable in KDE, so I decided to try Gnome again.

One True Blog?

So, here we are, testing Kev’s new blogging tool, Pure Blog. It’s super simple. I had a development copy running on my Mac in about 5 minutes.

AI bots have made site analytics less useful

Waffling. Home page layout wishes.

I’m back to using a Leica Q2. The constraints are a relief. For now.

Good grief it’s cold out

I’ve been alternating between Linux (Fedora/KDE) and macOS since the beginning of the year. I’d describe Linux and the software running on Linux like this: Less polish, more power. What I find challenging is that sometimes I want the power, other times I want the polish. Surprisingly, I am starting to prefer being in Linux than being in macOS. Linux feels like it’s mine and I like that feeling. Everything in the OS makes me believe it was done with me mind. “Me” being “the user”. Even when things are frustrating, I usually understand why. macOS used to feel this way, but has drifted from it. It’s not all Tahoe’s fault, but it certainly hasn’t helped. ...