I Love Bashblog

I'm a noob when it comes to basically everything computer: web design, programming, linux, you name it. Sometimes I forget that my friends see me as [The Expert](https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=fQGbXmkSArs) on the basis that I'm relatively comfortable using the command line[0]; because I still see myself as an absolute beginner. For the most part, that's true. I have no formal education in computer science nor any experience. I decided on a whim sometime in 2022-2023 that I wanted to know more, which is how I ended up in the tildeverse. But life happened, and beyond switching to Linux and putting together some less than stellar python scripts to practice speed math, I never ended up learning much of anything.

I have a few different spaces around the internet, two of which are websites. I know a little bit of HTML, and a vanishingly small amount of CSS. Until this blog, I had been writing everything for both websites manually in HTML. No static site generators, no markdown, no nothing. Part of the reason I stopped posting a lot is that that's just time consuming, especially if you want to maintain [an index of tags](https://tilde.team/~mathpunk/blog/all_tags.html) or something like that. Bashblog makes it stupidly, stupidly easy.

In the Great Beforetimes of 2019 and earlier, I spent a lot of time on twitter. Like, a genuinely concerning amount of time. Looking back, I think it's because I wanted to be seen, to be heard. I had a bad habit of posting too often, without thinking, and oversharing. But that desire to be heard was real. The desire to *create* something, to somehow contribute to what was going on around me instead of passively watching it, was real. It still is real. That's why I love bashblog. It's as easy for me as posting on twitter used to be, without any of the limitations that come with it.

Of course, most of the advantages I'm thinking of - ease of use, lack of a character limit, abilit to post whatever I want - can also be found on alternative social media. IIRC, there are more than a few mastodon instances with no character limit and markdown formatting. For a lot of reasons, I don't get on with social media, and Mastodon has proven to be no exception. I don't necessarily think social media is *bad*[1], but it's certainly bad *for me*. Why that's the case isn't really important to this post. What matters is that I seem to be getting something out of having a website that I don't get out of social media. All the good with none of the bad. And it's ridiculously easy to make posts like this one. It's ridiculously easy because bashblog makes it easy.

I love bashblog. Bashblog is great. That's really all I wanted to say here. Be seeying ya.

[0] Being on Linux since late 2023 has caused me to adjust to the terminal as a normal way to interact with the computer. I haven't really interacted much with the tildeverse outside of using tilde.team's XMPP service for a couple years, and when I started working on this website again it actually surprised me how much more comfortable I am now. I remember how awkward it felt and how afraid I was to do anything, lest I accidentally break something. Now I *know* I'm going to accidentally break something, so I keep my website, gemini capsule, gopherhole etc in separate git repos and commit frequently so I can reverse whatever damage I do :3

[1] I don't think social media is universally bad anymore, but in the spirit of Strikes n Gutters, here's a gutter: I used to be kind of a jerk about how "social media is bad for you" and whatnot. Conversations with friends taught me that that't not always the case, but I should've been able to figure that out myself. Sometimes I universalize unique experiences. Sometimes I assume universal experiences are unique to me. It's just like that sometimes.

tags: bashblog, blogging, social-media, writing