Posts

Does this sound familiar? You spend all morning squeezing out a paragraph, then all afternoon trying to make it the best paragraph in the world. The next morning, you reread that paragraph, decide it’s rubbish, then delete it. That’s your inner editor ambushing you before you’ve built any momentum. Although we talk about writing as a single monolithic activity, it actually involves three distinct roles or hats: the project manager, the writer, and the editor. Every piece of writing is a project. As project manager, you create a plan for the writer … who also happens to be you. When you’ve completed your draft, you hand it to the editor. Yes, that’s you, too. No wonder you’re tired. ...

One of the biggest barriers to writing is waiting until we have the time and space: “When I have a clear day, I’ll definitely get some writing done.” If I had 50p for every time a client told me that, I could afford to retire before I’m 97. I’m not immune to this problem, either. Although I’m good at blocking out time for writing, an early interruption often spirals into a pit of distraction and grumpiness. “Why did I bother starting?” 😾 ...

This year has been challenging, to say the least. I’ve needed to focus a lot on mental health and generally being a lot more selective about what I do. One of the most restorative practices I’ve found is learning a musical instrument. I’d already been learning piano and classical guitar, but needed a new adventure. I’ve always enjoyed hearing the bass, but had never even touched one. Last year, I was mesmerised by Tamsin Greig playing bass in the TV series Riot Women. ...

Although you can install Fathom Analytics with one line of code, it’s not immediately obvious where that line goes in a static site generator like Hugo 🤔 In this post, I’ll explain how to add Fathom Analytics tracking to a Hugo website. 💡 I’m using the Papermod theme, which supports extend_head.html for adding code to the header. Some Hugo themes use different approaches. Check your theme’s documentation if these steps don’t work for you. ...

One of my pet hates is cookie notices. Not only do they constantly interrupt my web browsing, but also it’s a faff to set them up on my own sites. Thanks to GDPR and similar legislation, website owners are legally required to obtain consent for collecting visitors’ personal data with tools such as Google Analytics. I was delighted to discover Fathom Analytics, a straightforward alternative to Google Analytics that doesn’t require cookie notices. Yes, that’s right. Fathom doesn’t collect personal data: it anonymises visitors’ IP addresses and doesn’t track people across websites. Plus, all the data from EU traffic is processed within the EU, which helps with GDPR compliance. ...

I’m trying to follow a self-imposed rule of backing up important work to at least three places. Given much of what I do is text-based, online git repositories are an obvious choice. But what if one of them suffers a DOS attack? Or tomfoolery around data protection and tariffs means it becomes unavailable in specific regions? I resolved to push my commits to both GitHub and GitLab. Initially, I tried GitLab’s mirroring to automatically pull all my changes from my GitHub repo. Although this works perfectly with public repos, it was a lot more fiddly with private repos. I definitely didn’t want a manual process or one that involved configuring additional passwords. ...

Although Zotero works smoothly with Word, not everyone wants to dedicate the best years of their life to Microsoft products. While Google Docs won’t necessarily bring you much more joy, at least it’s free and doesn’t occupy half your hard drive. In this post, I’ll explain how you can use Zotero to create citations and bibliographies in a Google Doc. To use Zotero with Google Docs, you need two elements: ...

One of my many new year’s resolutions was to impose order on my Gmail inbox. Despite my best efforts, I have several gigabytes of emails - all of which makes it difficult to back up or migrate them. Many of those email are invoices, receipts, or statements. I need to keep them for my business records, but they’re seriously cluttering up my workspace. Although I could create a mail archive with an email client like Thunderbird, that’s not very accessible. To find a specific invoice, I’d need to reimport those thousands of emails. I suddenly wondered whether there was a way of systematically saving the PDF attachments to a folder. After all, I don’t need the email itself, just the file. Needless to say, there wasn’t an especially straightforward method, or one that didn’t involve paying a third-party and giving them access to my mailbox. Finally, I discovered that I could run a script on my Gmail. ...

Mindmapping software can often feel overly rigid and complicated for capturing ideas quickly. Scapple, from the makers of the brilliant Scrivener, is a free-form, non-linear application for capturing your thoughts. It’s the closest software can get to a piece of paper and a pen – but you never run out of space. Scapple is available for both Mac and Windows. I’m basing this post on the Mac version, but it works broadly the same on both platforms. ...

When it comes to notetaking tools, I’ve always struggled with monogamy. After the initial excitement has worn off, I’m easily distracted by a more alluring alternative. Although my head has occasionally been turned, I’ve now been using Obsidian solidly for over three years. What’s different this time? In this post, I’ll explain my six main reasons for using Obsidian, and why I’ve chosen it over some of the alternatives. Now, I’ve seen people expressing strong feelings in the notetaking world 🔥 I’m not saying the alternatives are bad or wrong, it’s just that Obsidian better serves my needs. At least for now. ...