A few weeks ago I posed a question about a note-taking app to beat Vim, Markdown and Git. So far, that winner is Joplin. I’d tried Joplin once or twice but bounced off of it for one reason or another. The UI is a little less compelling than other native apps, I’d like a bit more between-note linking features, but after a couple of weeks of sticking with it, it’s growing on me.

Spent the bulk of the day today doing a little product testing, which involved a lot of yak shaving. Setting up a few servers to test, creating users, etc. It’s been a little while since I spent a whole day at the console. It’s been simultaneously fun, humbling, and eye-opening. Fun, for obvious reasons. Humbling, because my admin skills are a bit rusty and outdated. And eye-opening because of the sheer number of things that actually do “just work” which … hasn’t always been the case....

Mastodon is an odd beast. This has been discussed a lot from the user’s point of view, but not so much from the organizational point of view. Specifically, should organizations provide users with branded/hosted instances, and what kind of policies apply for this new breed of social media? (Note: I’m going to use “Mastodon” here, but this really applies to any kind of federated social media over ActivityPub or similar where users are identified in the “@user@organization....

Today’s been a good, but busy, day. Too busy to finish off that post that’s been lurking, for months, in my drafts but a good day to drop a few links that might be interesting.

It’s been more than 15 years since I worked for Data393 ( which doesn’t actually exist anymore…) but I still miss one of the perks of that job: 2U of rack space and a network drop with an IP address. Data393 was a hosting company in Denver and I worked in the NOC and as advanced support in 2004-2005. I mostly worked weekends, during a lull in my freelance writing. It was a great job where I learned a ton in short time about system administration and troubleshooting, the business of running a data center, customer support… and I really enjoyed the team there, too....

Happy to share that I started a new job this week as Head of Community at Percona! I know it’s traditional to talk about how excited you are for a new job, but it’s true, I’m really psyched about the opportunity, the team I’ll be working with and Percona as a company. Percona’s philosophy and mission align really nicely with my personal values. Percona is committed to open source and helping its customers succeed with open source databases. Not open core, open source.

Stumped for ideas what to blog about? Not sure what people would want to read that would be worth writing about? Here’s 20 prompts to get you started (some tweaking may be required). Yesterday I wrote about the 100 days of blogging challenge. A friend of mine asked if I had a good source of prompts for folks interested in doing something similar. Truth is, I hadn’t thought much about that.

My Mastodon network is picking up nicely. It’s not quite reached the same level or variety of activity from Twitter, but it’s getting there. I wonder if there’s a chance we can revive actual blogging as well? I’m giving it a shot with a 100 day blogging “challenge” for myself.

Loving the explosion of IndieWeb activity. For fun I decided to try out WriteFreely, a really minimal blog with ActivityPub features.

Yesterday I made an offhand comment about the long story of how I got started with Vim, so I figured I’d follow up today with that. That story takes us all the way back to 1999.