That 100 Days To Offload challenge

Previously, on Gemini, a year ago today:

On 18 August 2024 I tried the "#100DaysToOffload" challenge, wherein partipants attempt to write 100 blog posts over the next 365. I managed it exactly, with an hour or two to spare.

I was never short of things to say, indeed, there remains some uncovered ground. I mainly stuck to my policy area, which is UK housing. What got written about was the "low-hanging fruit" of stuff that can be broken off into digestible chunks and addressed in a few hundred words. Most of the housing articles got folded gradually into my "digital garden".

Tooling

A key thing that developed along the way was the tools:

• the thing for making the right filename for a gemlog post, with the right date format and so on
• the thing for re-doing the gemlog index
• the feature for saving and resuming articles in a "drafts" directory
• the thing for syncing my local copy to the server
• the thing for notifying Antenna of new posts
• the slightly buggy Elisp command for converting a "post" on the Gemlog into a "page" on the digital garden
• the thing that spotted orphaned pages in the Garden
• the thing for converting relevant gemlost posts into a PDF book
• the thing for organising the source code of all these tools into packages (part of a much larger effort that has nothing to do with gemlogging)
• the thing that monitored progress

The last of these, the progress monitor, produced output that looks like this:

$ offload-progress 
Actual: 94 posts in 363 days
Target: 99 posts by now (delta: -5)
Words: 44556 total
Word rate: 122 words/day (avg)
Words per post: 474 (avg)
$

This would tell me how many gemlost posts I was behind/ahead of the target. An offhand tweet by an acquaintance made me add the final two lines, which report on the word rate per day and per post. Something about doing this completely changed the psychology of the whole enterprise, around February this year, and I suddenly hit my stride. In the end I seem to have written 46713 words over the year, which does seem like a lot.

My gemlog is Gemini-only, much to the fury of some friends. At least one guy has installed Lagrange just because I don't want to conver the UK housing material to web format any time soon.

What didn't get written

Over time I ended up running increasinly into situations where I wanted to publish material somewhere *other* than my gemlog, or where getting into a particular topic would put me or neighbours in danger. That was a very serious headwind against just "getting stuff done".

What it did and didn't achieve

It definitely didn't make me a better writer in terms of what was written. I have a particular prose style, much loathed by those who must read it. I am no better at imagery or sentence structure than when I started. I commend Scott Adams' advice in "The Day You Became A Better Writer" but I ignore it for the kind of audience my gemlog gets.

But it pay down what I call "Intellectual Debt". Ideas that might or might not be any good, but which haven't been written down and are therefore "bugging me" somehow. Now I can just say "oh, it's on my gemlog".

Hopefully the Antenna notifications for all my housing stuff didn't get me too widely blocked!