Showing off my cat who loves to pose for Christmas cards 😍 #caturday

Last updated: 26th November 2019. Total updates since original publishing date: 2

In the last month or so I gave three talks about blogs and me: one lightening talk at ViewSource, one at TODO London and another one at ReactJSGirls. Although I had applied for them at different times, they all happened close to each other and with IndieWebCamp, FFConf, organising a career panel and a work deadline in between it is fair to say that I had a busy November so only now I’ve had time to convert my talk into a blog post.

Note: This post will be a mixture of all three talks. They were all sightly different from each other but the core message is the same.

If you’re reading this, you are now at the most recent home for my blog: ohhelloana.blog but this isn’t my first rodeo. Blogging as been a part of my life since my privileged bum got a computer and internet in the early 2000s. For some reason I really thought the whole world should read what I had to say about myself and The Wayback Machine is there to remind me that everything you do on the internet, stays on the internet forever.

I don’t remember all the URLs I had but I was a big fan of moving around and it means I lost some content (a blessing in disguise) but I do remember some from 2007 ~ 2008. So when I was preparing for my talks I read things I wrote 10 years ago and it was as bad as it sounds. It’s safe to say I’ve come a long way.

I think this an accurate timeline of my blogging life:

Until 2007 I had done it all: Geocities, FreeWebs, self hosting with cuteNewsPhp, phpBB forums, Coppermine Galleries, Wordpress, dot TK domains etc. I learned so much! I was always building things. I remember loving Dynamic Drive - (yes, I wanted a dinosaur cursor on my website and yes my scrollbars had the colours customised). I was just a kid who was building things for fun on the internet.

More towards university I had a somewhat popular blog - I even had students recognising me for writing in it and it was weirdly fun.

But obviously, as my timeline shows, something went wrong in 2012 and the answer to that is unfortunately easy. In 2012 I got my very first job in tech and everything stopped being fun.

At that point I deleted everything and my interest in blogging a new chapter of my life died too. I felt like I was the only junior developer in the world. And I was very junior. I didn’t come from a computer science course and all I knew, I learned by myself. I remember the laughs and the mean responses when someone asked my background and I said “I learned by myself from doing X”.

I figured that if I wasn’t as intelligent as everyone else, I needed to make sure people liked me. You can’t be dumb and unliked - those things get you fired. So, unconsciously, I started to ignore my interests in order to fit in with the rest.

I began to feel guilty for having fun in my free time - one time, one co-worker asked me what were my plans for the weekend and when I said it, his reply was: “maybe you should stay at home reading a javascript book”. Needless to say I didn’t do anything that weekend. I was in bed all day without energy to lift up any book.

I was good at hiding how depressed I was (or at least I think I was). I was functional and would only break down at home. But because I would breakdown at home and just spent my evenings crying and not reading javascript books I began to punish myself because I just couldn’t keep up with the “tech world” and my co-workers.

Being invisible was the safest option. I just didn't want to get fired at that point. All the joy I had was gone. But most importantly: I thought I was the only one feeling like this and because I was indeed the most junior person, I really believed that the problem was me.

This is what paused my “blogging life” but more things were happening around me. Social media was growing a lot in those years especially with the quick evolution of smart phones.

Anyone could simply create an account and share thoughts, photos and videos. The responsiveness was there and the ability to instantly share from your camera. Most (if not all) blogging platforms took too long to become responsive.

From my perspective I was seeing blogs and forums closing down or stagnating. And again, from my perspective:

• Instant/mobile/short sharing gave me the fake impression that my peers were constantly coding and reading tech content. Blog posts probably take a bit longer to craft compared to a tweet, for example;
• Sharing became intimidating as it could be blown out of proportion really quickly. It’s safe to say that the stage from your own little blog to social media is a bit more scary;
• I started to feel that I wasn’t allowed to ever miss a day of social media (tech news FOMO);

“How come these people have time to read and do everything after work?” I thought. My naiveness and inexperience created this thought inside my head that I wasn’t worthy and I should just give up.

This tech news FOMO was exacerbated by my feelings of guilt for not keeping up. I began to feel that if I was offline for any reason (holidays or my own mental health) I just couldn’t find things people shared anymore. Also, it is really hard to find anything on social media unless you know what you’re looking for. And, on top of that, my timeline was deciding what I should see.

At the time I just felt that I had to sign-up for every new cool social media thing just in case. If I was stressing out over this I can’t even imagine what someone, who choses not to have social media or simply live in a country that doesn’t allow them, would think.

In my terrible timeline drawing, the bit that went off rails can be described personally as a combination of toxic job/people + perception of success via social media + pressure to learn constantly and fear of missing out.

Now back to blogs:

Sometimes I wonder if I am like this.

When I was feeling low and alone I would recall how happy I used to be before I was working in tech. I would remember my silly fan sites, my experiments, my blogs and everything that I loved so much that made me become a developer.

But, thanks to social media, I very slowly started to find some people that would tweet things I could finally relate to. The following ones are more recent examples posted this year. There were a few more tweets from other people that were very important to me but because they were posted around 2013 -2015 I just couldn’t find them anymore. Nether-less, this is a beautiful example of someone sharing something I so much related to:

Tweet from Sarah Drasner: “I miss the useless web. I miss your grandpa’s blog. I miss weird web art projects that trolled me. I miss fan pages for things like hippos. I wish I didn’t feel like the web was collapsing into just a few sites plus a thousand resumes.”

This post by Patrick is exactly how I feel, especially this quote:

Seriously, I want to bookmark this, print it, share it far and wide, especially with people who are not on a twitter because, well, it’s an increasingly bad place for those who are mental illness survivors to be.

So, now more than ever I’ve been finding more and more people that I agree with! We should blog more and we can also have social media. These aren’t mutual exclusive!

So, why am I not?

I found a tweet (actually a thread) that puts it into better words than I could:

Tweet from Azeria: “I regularly get messages from people who are afraid to publish their own technical blog, because they’re afraid to be judged or think people will say it’s useless bc it’s nothing innovative or elite.”

Eventually my life moved on and things improved and I slowly started to think about blogging again. I wanted to share what I know about tech. Unlike my teenage years this became my occupation for about 8 hours per day but I would always stop myself because I was junior. I thought anything I would say, it would be already known my everyone. Which leads me to my very own FAQ:

Everyone already knows this!

This is the number one thought that ran through my mind every time I considered writing anything technical on my blog. It was an array of “everyone already knows this” to “everyone will make fun of me because of it”. It took me a lot of time to work around this thought, but one way that worked for me was to abstract myself from the scenario (or this fear) and ask myself: realistically, what do I do if I am looking for something?

The realistic answer is: I use my search engine, look for what I need, open 20 tabs, check each tab and if it isn’t the answer I am looking for I just close it.

That’s it - there is no other consequence. I’m overthinking something that is very unlikely to happen and has stopped me from writing things that may have been helpful to someone else.

This advice from Jeremy Keith to A Book Apart also puts it perfectly:

Tweet from A Book Apart quoting @adactio: “Share what you learn. And the best time to share is while you’re learning it. (You’ll have a voice in your head saying ‘Everyone knows this already’... Ignore that voice.)”

Not only that, but your learning voice is unique and different people learn better with different mediums. I, for example, struggle a lot to learn from video tutorials. If everything out there were videos, I would struggle a lot. But the following tweet from Angie Jones puts it into better words.

Tweet from Angie Jones: “If you've ever considered writing a blog post but didn't because it was already covered by other people, please reconsider. I'm searching for a tutorial on a topic and have passed on about 5 of them so far because their style doesn't resonate with how I learn. We need options 😊”

I’m X of my content!

I’ve lost count of how many times I said something like this regarding something I wanted to share. Replace that X with words like “shy” or “embarrassed”. Ironically, I only thought this when I thought of sharing something not tech related. For example, a blog post about a holiday but I do enjoy reading about these on someone else’s blog. If I enjoy reading other people’s posts, why am I so harsh and insecure about mine? While I’m at it who told us that enjoying anything not related to tech is bad? You’re more than your job title! You’re a whole person!

The reality is a little bit more positive than what our brains trick us into thinking. And being realistic, I don’t even get enough visitors on my blog to justify being afraid of posting anything here. It is tricky but all it takes is to practise the realistic consequences on your brains. These thoughts, these fears, they pop in your head, and you know they are there, you can recognise them. They are with you as a “survival skill” and to warn you about the worst consequence. But you shouldn’t ignore them. You should work alongside them.

One of my fears is having someone mocking my English skills. In this case I use my fears as a tool to make sure I won’t publish mistakes on my blog. I don’t want to let it stop me from writing altogether. I want to use it as check point. I will ask some people to proof read before publishing instead. Your fears are part of who you are and use them to your benefit.

No one is going to read it.

Treat it like a hobby. If your hobby is cooking, you don't expect to have an audience in your kitchen whenever you're baking right? Treat your blog the same way. Do it for yourself.

I don’t have time to keep a blog.

I am not going to lie: probably the most consuming task would be to set it up in the first place. But after that, there is no contract that expects you to publish daily, weekly or monthly. The same way you don't feel pressure to publish on social media (hopefully).

It's scary.

It can be. Blogs may be associated with diaries and the feeling that once something is written down, it is forever. Sharing on social media has this "feeling" that the action is more lightweight and less serious. Nowadays big announcements (usually not nice ones) are shared on companie's blog posts while happy announcements are all over social media.

Depending on how you run your blog (if you have a CMS behind it or not), it may take some extra time to delete something we have regretted publishing. This may be beyond my pay grade but you may have to ask yourself what exactly are you afraid of and work around it. If anything, when in doubt, keep it in your drafts and sleep on it.

Okay, so I’m feeling less intimidated with posting on my blog. Now, where do I even begin?

Community

Things are changing, or as I prefer to say, slowing going back to what they used to be. Parts of the tech community have been getting together and talking about owning your own content. Two quick examples are the IndieWeb community and the #newwwyear hashtag.

I discovered the IndieWeb around a year ago and I found a place that would support me into beginning to publish again. I started to attend my local HomeBrew Website Club and even attended the IndieWebCamp. The #newwwyear hashtag even has a slack channel where you can ask some questions or get some feedback.

My point is: the community is here for you. You’re not alone. If you’re new to tech you can also potentially find a local community that helps you code, such as codebar.

Connect with like minded people

Last year I went to View Source and I saw Jeremy Keith’s talk on building the blocks of the IndieWeb. I knew about IndieWeb at this point but I had never seen anyone on stage talking about it. When I got home I started to “dig in” and I found more people talking about blogs. I felt so happy! I was not alone! If you have a moment, also see Georgie Luhur Cooke's talk "Your blog ≠ everyone else’s blog". I reckon these two videos combined represent a big part of what I believe. This part is closely connected to “find a community” but when I finally had the courage to say “hi” to these people that helped me a lot. It made me feel less alone.

Do the tech bit

Tech wise, it doesn’t matter. No one cares what you use to publish your blog. As far as I’m concerned having an HTML that only has links to other HTML pages counts as a lot to me. Whatever you choose as a blogging platform is right because it is the right one for you and in this process, only you matter. Nobody has time to check your code source and almost nobody cares. If anyone does inspect your code, it is probably because they are curious how you built your site. So that they can learn something.

If you're keen into building your own thing, do check this list of static site generators.

Don’t overthink your content

As I said before: you’re more than your job title. Don’t know what to post? Here are some ideas: Today I learned, travel, cooking, job stuff, thoughts, “retrospectives”, experiences, just photos. EVERYTHING IS VALID.

If you need an extra push, read this amazing article from Sara Soueidan called “Just write”. She is spot on! One of the greatest tips I got from it was removing analytics and comments so that I don’t overthink about it. Not knowing if people visit my blog allows me to feel free to be myself without censorship.

Write something when you had a good day

I have bad days quite often and I don't choose them. Sometimes I say to myself "Sunday morning I will write about that thing I thought about in the tube" but many times Sunday ends up being a not so great day.

I guess others can relate to this by using the idea of "writer's block". Other times it is my own mental health. My advice would be to write something, anything if you had a good day. If you're having a "not so great day" it will be easier to edit a draft instead of writing from scratch.

When I have bad days I am demotivated and my own worst enemy and biggest critic so I found that this helped me a bit more.

Be comfortable with your voice

Some people say "find your voice" but I don't think that is the most important bit. I really think people need to be comfortable with their voice. A while back I wrote a draft and when I read it back it just didn't sound like me. I hated it. I was trying to sound something I am not. One of my immediate thoughts were "if someone close to me reads this, they know I don't speak like this" and I felt embarrassed. I re-wrote it. Now it probably sounds like a chat you would have with me in the pub, but hey, at least it is more real.

Embrace it

Doesn’t fit in 280 characters? You probably want to blog it then. If you thought it would have made a good tweet, it is worth existing elsewhere too.

So, about blogging...

A while back I found the following tweet:

Tweet from @HeyChelseaTroy: “I started a blog years ago to record what I learned about programming. As I have advanced, my posts have begun to give me credibility with technologists I don't personally know. That blog has given me a writing voice. But it has also protected my speaking voice.”

I believe you should blog because you want to, not because you think you must. And yes, while you do it some great consequences can come out of it (like the tweet above points out).

Blogging can:

• Solidify what you’ve learned;
• Give you a voice;
• Empower you;

Bonus:

• Searchable;
• Memories that you own and are in control of;

NOTE: you don’t need a blog and/or social media presence to be amazing at your job. My talks about blogging were mostly for people who already wanted to do it but needed an extra push.

Back to this:

The line went up. I left places that weren’t good for me. I unfollowed people that weren’t good for me. This didn’t happen from one day to another. My current blog was created in 2014. Very slowly.

But, what also helped me…

A while back not many people were sharing a lot unrelated to tech. But it was reading and seeing things unrelated to tech posted by a few people that made me realise that my peers are not code/design machines but humans like myself who also have doubts, fears, joy and experiences besides their job. Reading about how relatable all of you are, keeps the community going, fosters empathy and stops the culture of overwork.

I promise that doing these talks was a lot more fun than writing them now in a blog post. I managed to add some jokes in there and sound a bit less sad so perhaps I express myself better in person. I'd like to thank everyone who took some minutes to message me on social media. It really meant a lot to know that some people relate to this experience and that I am on the right path to connect with like minded people.

Useful links:

• IndieWeb
• Your "thread" should have been a blog post
• "Just write"
• StaticGen
• Jeremy Keith’s talk on building the blocks of the IndieWeb
• Georgie Luhur Cooke’s talk: Your blog ≠ everyone else’s blog
• 5 Reasons You Should Write That Blog Post
• A Starting Point for Writing Technical Blog Posts
• Welcome to 2019! You Should Write that Blog Post
• 7 Reasons to Panic When Writing a Tech Blog Post — and What to Do About It
• Some Unsolicited Blogging Advice
• Personal Blogs: Don't Call it a comeback!
• Personal websites are awesome!
• Ladybug podcast: Blogging 101
• Into the Personal-Website-Verse
• The Benefits of Owning a Personal Blog
• Tweet from Coraline Ada Ehmke
• Tweet from Charlotte

Last weekend I attended my very first IndieWebCamp in Berlin. I planned it very last minute and was lucky that flights were still at an acceptable price. I’ve been wanting to attend one for a while. I found out about the IndieWeb because somehow I stumbled upon a list of blogs that were created in a previous IndieWebCamp and that’s how I discovered one of my favourite blogs: JulieAnnenoying (Julie Anne was the photographer for the event. The photos are available here and here).

It was so much fun! I loved meeting people that I had only “met” via twitter before, the discussions and the opportunity to work on my blog and being able to ask for help.

Speaking of my blog, on the second day of IndieWebCamp (the code day), I made my instagram posts automatically post into my blog while saving a copy in my GitHub. That would trigger a build and deploy to Netlify (where my blog is currently hosted).

It isn’t perfect yet - in fact I would like to change the way they render but it is working.

Since I actually took some time to figure out how to make it work and because I “should practise what I preach” here is the blog post of how I did it, what went wrong and what should be better.

What did I do?

Now, whenever I post a photo to instagram it is automatically picked up, publishes to my GitHub repo which then triggers a build in my netlify account.

How?

Using OwnYourGram and a package called “webpage micro pub to gitHub”.

But, how again?

Right, in order to have this working I had to have IndieAuth on my blog so that I could even use OwnYourGram.

I’m a bit embarrassed to admit this but it took me too long to figure out that the process was WAY more simple than I thought. When I opened some pages about the IndieAuth I spent too much time trying to figure if I needed an access token and how to generate one. This was mistake number one. Instead of just copy pasting code and poke it, I spent too much going around all wiki pages and just feeling lost. For this particular case it wasn’t needed at all.

As it turns out all I had to do was to add the following:

  < link rel="authorization_endpoint" href="https://indieauth.com/auth">
  < link rel="token_endpoint" href="https://tokens.indieauth.com/token">

I would then have to enter OwnYourGram and follow the steps to test it. When you’re missing something, OwnYourGram informs you of what you’re missing so that was really useful. After getting my IndieAuth working I realised that I also needed to have a micropub endpoint.

I should have learned from my first mistake, but because I didn’t, I spent too much time reading the wiki about micro pub endpoints and at this point I was feeling a bit frustrated and feeling a bit dumb.

Impatience got the better of me so I decided to add to my < head > the following and just poke and see what happens:

  < link rel="micropub" href="https://www.ohhelloana.blog/micropub">

And yes. It failed. I had no idea what I was doing but it was worth giving it a go.

At this point I decided to search “Jekyll micro pub endpoint” and I found this repository.

Ding ding ding - everything I wanted: works with Jekyll, does a mysterious thing for me, pushes to GitHub automatically!

I want to say that I went straight to the ReadMe but that would be lying. I did the classic:

  npm i “assume name of thing there” —save

It didn’t work. So I went to the ReadMe. There was no npm. So I thought “I don’t know what I am doing and I should know what I am doing”.

The fantastic bit about IndieWebCamp was being surrounded by people who know what they are doing. So I asked for help. Turns out, what I had to do was to click on the purple Heroku button.

At this point I FINALLY understood what the repository did. I forked my own version and re-added it to Heroku.

As per ReadMe, I added the config variables in the Heroku panel and added to my < head > the following:

< link rel="micropub" href="https://ohhelloana-micropub.herokuapp.com/micropub/main">

I finally had a micro pub endpoint! So I signed in again to OwnYourGram, followed all the steps (now I already had all the requirements) and tested it. I chose one of my existing photos to be published. That worked! So I decided to take a photo, post on instagram and see (after a while) if it would publish automatically (it did).

Here’s when things got more complicated: Everything was (and is) working as I expected but when I opened it on my blog, I didn’t like the URL. I wanted to create a specific URL and following the suggestions in the ReadMe didn’t work. I spent quite a few hours on this but eventually it resulted in creating a gitHub issue in the original package (also my very first gitHub issue).

Another issue I found is that when trying to share an instagram post that has more than one photo, my Heroku app times-out and I need to restart it. This can probably be fixed by upgrading my account but I can’t afford it right now.

But, in all fairness, the micro pub repository that I used is likely not even ideal for this type of content (media content from instagram) so my “issues” may not be real issues as it wasn’t designed to work with it. But it was my very first attempt and it allowed me to understand how it works. Maybe in the future I may create my own micro pub endpoint or use something else more suitable for instagram content.

When that happens I could potentially be even more fancy and, like a friend suggested, automatically generate smaller resolutions of my instagram posts so that I can load them in my main post list instead of the original size ones and save on data downloaded and improve performance.

Unfortunately, I also have to manually add alt descriptions to my images.

It is far from perfect but it is something.

I am happy that I did something productive in those hours in IndieWebCamp and I am for sure very inspired to build more things for my blog. I am just upset that I may not have the technical skill or time to do everything.

This is what I accomplished:

If I post a photo on instagram, it publishes on my blog too and I will host a copy of said image in my blog.

This was my first "official post". I deleted the test ones. The stickers in that photo allowed me to discover IndieWebCat ❤️.

Issues:

• No alt text;
• Currently isn’t handling more than one photo in a post;
• URLs are not customised;
• Images only available in full resolution;

I want to plug my Twitter into my blog and add webmentions too. Hopefully for this year’s #newwwyear

Thank you everyone at IndieWebCamp. I had a wonderful weekend!

Useful links:

• IndieWeb
• Jekyll - IndieWeb and MicroPub
• IndieWebCat

Tiff came to visit us 🐶💚

Postcards from Berlin