Writing on passthejoe

A tribute to the Chicago Manual of Style (while mostly mentioning the AP Stylebook)

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 07:46:46 -0700

I’m not a Chicago Manual of Style editor, though I could be.

Coming up in the world of journalism, the bible is the AP Stylebook, and I probably used it 20 times a day at one point. Eventually you remember what’s in there and can quote passages from memory. This was in the days before the Web took over, and we had reference books, physical clips of old newspapers and a telephone. (When we couldn’t figure something out, we’d make a call.)

Friction in the Hugo composition process — Part 1

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 00:11:00 -0800

I would write more, I say, if it was easier to start, write and publish a blog entry.

I have a Bash script that allows me to easily write and publish microblog-style entries. Maybe I should come up with something similar for Hugo. It’s been on my to-do list.

I can write tweets quickly. But a Hugo blog entry is a different thing.

There’s a bunch of metadata at the top of the post. You need a title, time and date, author name and Twitter handle field. I guess I can forget about that last one in the Elon era. And then there are tags. And I can choose, post by post, whether to show the full post in the index, or not. There’s an optional description that makes the blog listing pages look much better. You have to come up with a file name.

Writing in git vs. blogging

Sun, 21 Jun 2020 14:10:21 -0700

Any of us who have been blogging over the past 10 or more years has written hundreds or maybe thousands of posts.

I’m pretty sure I have at least a couple thousand.

But blog writing and other writing are different. A blog tends to say “this is now, things below this are in the past, things above this will appear in the future.”

It’s reverse-chronological. That’s not a horrible thing.