Killing some time while the youngest is at swimming. I kind of wish I would had a little more time to run but this was probably good enough as I ate about 30 min before so felt sluggish.
Sorry for any noise in my RSS feed as of lately. I have been pulling in posts from Weblog and Obsidian Publish to my Micro.blog site as a way to make everything in one place again. I want to say I am done with having random posts in random places but this is something I can not guarantee myself.
Couldn’t pass up on this amazing day to get out for a long run. Decided to go find some hills around Christmas Lake.
Obsidian Publish Update
Let’s just say it was a good run and test. I published a handful of posts about things I was finding out about it and honestly it is very slick if you are using Obsidian to quickly posts something online and it just works. I think one of the bigger downsides to me if someone wanted to use it as an actual blogging platform is that the RSS is really not great at all. I am sure there could be ways to get that to work better or you could spend the time curating something to work better there but that seems like more friction than I would want to do. Even though I didn’t mention it earlier it is $8 per month if you pay for a year and that is kind of hefty in comparison to other blogging platforms you can find out there that are built more for well blogging. If you are looking for one I would check out one of the following
- omg.lol - For $20 a year you get access to all the great omg.lolapps which are worth much more than that in my option. From a blog perspective you can use Adam’s weblog.lol that is part of the $20 per year. However, you you might want to hold off till Adam is done creating Neato as it sounds well… Neato!
- micro.blog - There is a lot of apps you can get from Micro.blog depending on your subscription level. However, right now Manton has a new offering micro.one that is $1 per month blog which is an awesome price and way to get people blogging.
In the end, between the RSS and honestly having too many blogging platforms that I pay for already (both above for starters) and don’t always use I realized I didn’t really need another place to just publish posts as I have worked so hard over the years trying to combine things in one place. So that is probably the biggest reason for ending the experiment.
However, with that said I did jump back into weblog.lol again as I wanted to see if I could get Obsidian synced up to make it easy to post there as I do with Micro.blog today. Once I get the setup I feel good about I will share that setup next, however, I get it might be all for nothing once everything gets switched to Neato but that is OK, it helped me focus on something else this past week.
While I wait the cold out this morning as I would like to get a run in, I decided to make some breakfast sandwiches for the family. Not going to lie, they were delicious.
Weekly Thing Newsletter
If you are looking for a great Newsletter to sign up for I would highly suggest the Weekly Thing by Jamie Thingelstad. He does a great job of sharing interesting stuff he has read over the week with his own take.
This week specifically was pretty neat as well with the introduction of the 5 people whom he gifted a years subscription of blogging to as part of his “Christmas blogs”. I forgot to comment about it when he first wrote about it but this was such a great idea as a way to get more people blogging. I checked each of them out and am now following 5 new people and it will be interesting to see what each ends up doing with their blog going forward.
After spending the day working and messing around with other tasks I decide to do a short run to get the body moving today. It was a good nighttime run and felt great.
Some days you just don’t have it. 🤷♂️
It wasn’t even the coldest day, but I felt cold and tired the entire run. Pushed through to hit my usual number, only to realize I stopped at 6 instead of 6.2. 🫠 Guess the sums up the run and day!
Glad it was warmer out today so I took advantage of this warm weather to get a longer run in. I felt pretty good overall but probably helped having the day off yesterday.
Using Obsidian for Micro.blog
I was doing my yearly backup of my Micro.blog site as well as other things I have online just to pull them down and store them on my local storage. As I was curious about what was in the zip file, I was reminded that all of the posts are in Markdown, and then I got this crazy idea: why not just load all these Micro.blog Markdown files into my Obsidian vault? Mostly because for almost the last 10 months, I have been using Obsidian for the start of all my posts and then publishing them using Micro.Publish. So I decided to do exactly that, and now I have a full backup in Obsidian, which is really nice.
Honestly, it was too easy to just get everything in here, and in the Properties part of the file, it had everything I really would need in order to make changes locally and use Micro.Publish to update old posts as part of my blog gardening from time to time. Well, it was all there, but some of the information needed to be modified. Seeing how I didn’t want to go to each file and update things, I turned to my friend AI to assist in this process and create a Python script to do all the work for me. This is where AI really shines, as I figured out what I needed the end results to look like and then just asked with an example of what it is now and what it needs to look like. More specifically, the changes I wanted to make in each file were as follows:
- create a “permalink” property based off of the url: one but remove the .html at the end
- for the “url” property append ericmwalk.blog before it so it would actually link to my blog (this is needed to have Micro.Publish update the right file)
- Replace the Categories property with Tag
- Add a “title” property for anything that doesn’t have a title and leave it blank
- Add a Publish property with the default setting of “false” as this is something that tells Obsidian Publish (if you are thinking of using that ever) if you want it published or not.
- Remove all other properties that are not needed for the file to be able to be published again (e.g., images, photos, lastmod, guid, post_id)
- Now maybe some of those things could come in handy at some point in the future but my reason for removing them is if I use Obsidian as my soruce of truth now these things do not get published or matter if I change them if I am updating the file.
- Reorder the Properties to just make it more pleastnt to my eyes in the following order: Title, Publish, Date, Tags, Permalink, and URL
The good thing is AI was able to do all of this heavy lifting for me and fix the files as described above. I appreciate how it took a tedious task that I could have done to each file and just based on my trial and error of getting the right output (~20 min), I was able to get something that went through all the files and the properties section is how I want it.
The only downside of my overall approach is that I did it in 3 steps mostly because I didn’t want to start back over, and I realized after a couple of things changed, I wanted more as well as cleaning up some of the properties section. The end results were these three files below if anyone else wants to give it a go, but I would probably test small if you are actually going to use them.
- Steps 1-5 Micro.blog File Edit for Obsidian - Update Properties
- Step 6: Micro.blog File Edit for Obsidian - Remove Unused Properties
- Step 7: Micro.blog File Edit - Reorder Properties for Personal Preference
Maybe if I have time at some point I will put it all in one file but the first one is really the most important in my opinion. I am also wondering if about making folders only by month instead of month and day as I typically don’t post more than 1x per day anyways. So I might need another script to help with this lifting next.
Today feels like an inside the house workday seeing how it is fairly cold outside, and the shed office is a bit cooler than I’d like. I could head to a local office we have that I have visited once but this is highly unlikely since it’d mean braving the cold to start the car and drive.
It was another cold day but I was getting a little stir crazy sitting with no running and I couldn’t go a third. So I decided to venture out for a short one and it wasn’t too bad since there was not much wind. Also, got my yearly Frozen Face so I can check that off my list.
Blog Question Challenge 2025
It seems as though Jason has challenged me to do some work this weekend and answer questions. 🫠
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
This is a great question and I don’t have a great answer. I know I dabbled back in my High School days of just writing silly things and posting it to a static webpage with just straight HTML. So that would have been at least back in 1998 since I worked at an Internet Service Provider with a good friend of mine. I probably kept doing that off and on then even though college as I have recolections of sites and that is where my Brebs.net domain came from (probably more on that another time). However, I would say actually documented in a CMS kind of blogging software started in 2007 when my wife and I went to Peru we documented out travels and then we started another one up the months before our first was born in 2009. However, you will see this blog really only goes back to 2011 when I started doing one just more for myself again. Also, I don’t really have anything prior to 2007 online either but I do have the Travels and Family one still online that reminds me of another project that I want to do something with them at some point.
What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use it?
Everything is in Micro.blog for me at this moment and no real plans to change. I have tinkered with some other platforms since going all in on Micro.blog in January of 2022 but this platform fits my needs of having short posts to document things I am thinking about as well as longer form ones as well. I appreciate the work that Manton has done so far and I know he keeps making it better and adding features from time to time.
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
Of course I have… Seems like a silly question as I would like to find the one person that has been blogging for longer than a decade that has used the same platform since they originally started. I am going to include in here some of the places I have trialed as well but just didn’t stick but I was more curious. So here is the list:
- Micro.blog
- Blogger
- WordPress at Wordpress.com
- WordPress Self Hosted
- Weblog.lol
- Pika.Page^
- Scribbles^
- Obsidian.Publish^
- Public.Me^
Honestly now that I typed these out I feel like there is probably others that I am just not remembering that I gave a try. However, that have been more short lived or that I am justing giving a try to for fun I noted with a ^.
How do you write your posts?
Everything now starts in Obsidian and gets published to Micro.blog from obsidian. The nice thing is since pulling all my posts down into Obsidian I can go back and edit everything in there too and using Micro.Publish plugin it is super simple to post and update anything.
What’s your favorite post on your blog?
I think my personal favorite is the one where I documented running a 5k a day for 365 days. It is mostly two fold because on the one had it was for me to just document what I did and my own accomplishment as that is really what I like about a blog is a good way to document things. The second is I did get a lot of feedback about it and in fact connected me with a conversation on a Podcast with two guys talking about running and one of which I still chat with from time to time today. The is the second part of Blogging that is amazing is that it does connect you with people you might have not run across in your normal day to day life and makes the world feel that much smaller.
Any future plans for the blog?
I have no real plans at this time as I like the current setup and it is working pretty well. I have been thinking about putting all my images on Bunny to have them hosted from there but for now I think having everything on Micro.blog works perfectly for what I want.
Who will participate next?
Is it a good morning? 🥶 I guess I am inside with a hot cup of coffee with little plans to do much more outside today than shuttle kids to some games.
With this… we have another teenager in the house.
Happy Birthday to our oldest daughter who always seems amazes me. 🎉🎂🥳
Morning run and the weather felt great. Well the weather felt great but my legs were screaming at me. I probably shouldn’t have pushed it but the next 4 days are going to be cold and I wanted to get a mile builder.
Not sure why but I find this article very interesting learning about Astoria, Oregon as well as hearing the coined term “The Graveyard of the Pacific” about the Columbia River. The best part is if you don’t want to read the article you can watch the YouTube video instead.
So nice out today I ditched my outer shell jacket for this run. Didn’t have time for a super long one today which would have been nice but at the same point I was feeling tired so probably worked out for the best.
