Note #0 - What are Notes, Frank?

I bought the domain fd93.me in 2021, not long after I moved to Asia. Originally it was a Wordpress site hosted on AWS Lightsail, but I got tired of the complexity of Wordpress for actually writing. See The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Simple Websites, which was itself inspired by No Boilerplate's The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Plain Text.

At first I was focused on studying Chinese and on some study tips for doing that more effectively, but as I've drifted back into the tech industry, my content has become more technical. At the same time, writing articles that fit into the general category is pretty time-consuming!

For articles in the general category, I want to provide a good amount of depth and look at topics that aren't widely covered elsewhere. The only real way to do this is to work on a project or to do a deep dive into academic or technical content, which is time-consuming. It also takes a lot of time to copy-edit these articles because I want them to have a certain level of polish, need to find good cover pictures, and make sure I have links to other relevant topics. These articles often run to several thousand words at first draft, meaning it takes me somewhere between 8 and 24 hours to go from initial idea to what you see.

Since I'm not a full-time writer, this limits how much I'm able to publish. It also stops me from writing some of the things I'd really like to, like updates on my various projects or reviews of books that don't fit into a coherent theme like Four Books on (Zen) Buddhism. Finally, it forces me to choose between publishing on the blog and working on other projects like plainban.

A lot of the time I want to write content which is shorter than a magazine-style article, but longer than a Mastodon post. This is the kind of work I'll put into notes. Some examples of things that are a good fit for notes, but don't justify a full article:

• Reviews of software, books, games, etc.
• More personal writing which doesn't fit neatly into a magazine-style article.
• Journal-style updates on personal projects.
• Link collections around particular topics (I might make pages for these, though).
• Meta topics about the site itself (like this one!).

Since notes are probably still interesting to people, they're still going to hit the RSS feed, and in time I'm planning to change the theme of this site to make notes a bit more prominent. But for now, you can find notes from site navigation.

Hope that regular readers appreciate this change and the more frequent updates I'll be able to make in the near future!