TL;DR: I still favor the notion that a blog post is "a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox". So, I keep wanting to put energy into this thing, keep trying to throw those search queries out there. I tried a bunch of things to make that happen in 2025.

Enthusiasm in May

Last May, I rigged up some plumbing to make it super easy to jot down ideas in Obsidian and have them automagically published via my own Easy-Blog Oven. That worked, insofar as I managed to blog up a storm and post 54 (!) times in May.

June and after

But, the novelty wore off, and my serially enthusiastic ADHD brain had me wandering off to something else shiny. And, well, a lot of crap happened last summer that I didn't feel like broadcasting on any channel. So, the posting spree tapered off rather sharply.

Interestingly, though, I did manage to post at least a couple things every month for the rest of the year. So, that's something. More than nothing, at least.

Weeknotes and pebbling

Another thing I've been trying is posting weeknotes - or, at least, that's what I've called them. A lot of folks are doing weeknotes, but I think I first got the idea from Giles Turnbull. I've seen weeknotes vary from sparse bullets to sprawling journal entries. I've seen a range from professional to confessional. Some are personal reflections, some are more like newsletters.

Mine have sort of landed in that newsletter-ish shape, since I'm not thinking-out-loud for myself so much as trying to cast those search queries into the ether. Also, I've been still sort of ruminating on ideas I had for my half-formed and mostly abandoned Pebbling Club:

That is, a thing I've really liked doing on the internet is finding things in feeds, gathering & stashing them, then sharing them back out in hopefully interesting ways for fascinating folks. Routing shiny pebbles to potential friends on the web. Occasionally, I'll make & share something original, but being a human repeater feels fun to me.

Another central feature of weeknotes is that, well, they're a weekly habit. I couldn't quite manage a daily blogging habit, so I thought maybe I could manage a lower frequency.

Still, again blaming my ADHD brain, I find habits of any kind or periodicity really hard to establish and maintain. And that sucks, because regularity is how a lot of resonant things get built up over time.

Building a PESOS capacitor

That said, I do manage to toot on the fediverse at random intervals and length. I've also been collecting web links for a couple decades across various services and tools.

So, for my latest wave of weeknotes since October through last week, I decided to build myself some tooling. If I can't automate a habit in myself, maybe I can harness my natural semi-random behavior with a capacitor that smooths the output to a more consistent flow?

Toward that end, I built linkding-to-markdown and mastodon-to-markdown as little CLI tools. Like it says on the tins, these format what I did over a given timespan into markdown documents. Then, I composed a weeknotes-blog-post-composer skill for Claude Code which uses those markdown documents as context to draft up a more coherent blog post in prose, complete with images and links and all the rest.

The result is not entirely unlike what I would have written, if I'd had the activation energy and executive function to do all text juggling by hand. Having that initial draft gets me way past the blank page problem. But, I don't just shovel that to the web as-is: I edit, delete, rearrange, and rewrite until I think it's in decent enough shape to call mine.

So, my weeknotes have become a kind of Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site feature where I recap what I already spewed elsewhere, but hopefully in a less atomized form. Overall, I think this process has helped me, insofar as I kept new weeknotes going out for over 10 weeks. So, that's neato. But, I'm not entirely happy with the results yet - and, no, it's not Claude's fault.

What now?

I think I want to say more, build on what I'm remixing. Write more little posts, elaborate on the random toots, explain why I'm sharing particular links. Problem is, again, that I don't quite have the energy or function to make that happen on the regular.

I'm not sure what I do from here. I might keep up the weeknotes in current form, try to pour a bit more effort into them beyond PESOS. I'm probably going to try posting more creative writing again, as I'm quietly making gains on that front as a habit, despite all odds.

It's still all casting echoes into the void, though, since I don't get much in the way of hits on my search queries. Could be I really need to step up my game to say something interesting? Could be I need to keep up the tempo and eventually some things land?

Maybe I'll do like Dave Winer says and keep digging.