I draft all my posts longhand, which means that I then have to retype them on the computer. Silly me.
Writing Tools
- A Bic pen (blue ink), or a fountain pen (blue ink, too)
- A bunch of sheets of paper. Most of the time, I use the back of old letters, invoices and stuff like to avoid wasting paper. I cut those sheets in half so I get smaller and much less intimidating A5-sized sheets to write on.
- A bull clip, to hold said sheets together.
Publishing Tools
- Text editor: VScodium.
- For formatting the content, I use Markdown, a very simple and very effective formatting language one can learn in minutes.
- Image editing: not much editing, really. But I do try to make those images as light as possible: they are resized to 700 pixels width and converted into the AVIF file format, which creates much smaller files than any other format without perceptible loss of quality in the image, using ImageMagick. (Prior to using AVIF, I was using a compression method called dithering that drastically reduces the image size as well as its quality — they looked somewhat like those photos printed in very old newspapers. I stole the idea from LOW←TECH MAGAZINE.)
- The website itself is created with Hugo, a free static website generator. A static website means that there is only simple HTML pages, no php and no javascript that need to run in your browser. Hopefully, making it much faster (and safer) to load. The theme is a modified version of x-mini.
- The website is hosted by monarobase, a small French company that offers really great services with an over-the-top customer support, at a very fair price.
What computer do I use?
All the tools I mentioned should run on any computer, no matter its operating system. I use a Mac Studio and a GNU/Linux Mint laptop PC.
Last edited: 2024, August 26.
Published: 2024/01/01