Hello! 👋
I’m James. I’m sure you know that if you’re reading this. If you don’t - poke around this site and you’ll probably learn a lot more about me. Yay!
I’ll keep this short as I am still working, obviously, on building out my personal website here on howat.io. However, I have decided to set a goal to write a least a small blog every… single… day…
We’ll see how that goes, but putting it out in “public” with this post will add some weight to the commitment.
I think I’ll use the rest of this post to briefly set the expectation for what my readers will find:
What
What will I write about? Pretty much whatever I want. I would expect random rambling about the things I’m interested in: technology, travel, motorcycles, radios, improv, hiking, etc.
What else? Well… 365 posts is a lot, so if I can actually stick with it, I bet things will periodically go off the rails. Maybe there will end up being a serialized novel or something. Who knows? I certainly do not.
Why
The ‘why’ of this blog is largely the same as the ‘why’ of this entire site. I think many of us find satisfaction in sharing some aspects of our lives with other people (presumably people we know, but also strangers on the internet, to an extent). Maybe that sounds weird, but I think it’s true - my evidence being the ubiquity of social media like Facebook and Instagram. On the other hand I think that those sites have now become a net negative. They are built around algorithms that are designed to hijack your dopamine pathways and keep your attention for as long as possible. I find them to be such a drain that I have essentially cut them from my life.
In short - This site is my way of pushing back against the corpo social algorithms and lean into a return of the old web / indie web / small web / days of yore while I share bits of my life online. Maybe I have rose-colored glasses, but the days of web forums and Geocities seemed better - at least as far as the internet is concerned. Lots more to say about this sort of stuff - call it generally the 'Web Revival’ - but I will save that for another post.
By the way, along with this daily blog, this site also hosts a photostream. I intend to use this as my personal Instagram replacement, but I’m challenging myself to post at least one photo per day - a photo I actually took that day - so check that out if you’d rather see pictures of my dog (which I assume will be 90% of the content) than read my thoughts about APRS or whatever. 🤓
When
Every day. Every damn day.