Hi, I’m Ezra Ball. This is my new blog.

It’s full of stuff that doesn’t fit in my various social media presences. Twitter contorts language and punctuation so badly it hurts me to use it. I haven’t figured out where Instagram fits into my life, but I think I like it? I loved Flickr dearly in the mid 00’s, but it’s only a shadow of its former self (but it’s a good document of that period of my life). Facebook is great for a lot of reasons; for one, you know when your words are or aren’t resonating with your audience. But because my facebook audience is made up of so many people from so many different parts of my life (which I like a lot, and it’s normally a feature, not a bug), I find myself only posting things that are bland and short.

But I craved more. So this blog is for longer ideas, with links to longer, more important, reads.

It’s probably only for the Ezra Ball completist. If you’ve suffered this far already, you are probably that.

I created it in January 2016, rather than resurrecting my old one, (for reasons I discuss here).

Anonymity & Honesty

I am putting my name on this thing. I thought about making this blog anonymous but it didn’t feel right.

But I also don’t want to hurt anybody or put a bunch of stuff out that could be misinterpreted to someone who stumbles here without context, without knowing me. I have friends I talk to and a private journal I keep offline when I need to get things off my chest. So telling the whole truth on the blog all the time is probably not that important to me right now.

But getting to know me is sort of the whole point. So I intend to put myself out there. Perhaps a little more so than I’m usually comfortable with, and work through things in a quasi-public venue that isn’t currently getting expressed in any other venue.

When I was writing more often in the old blog, it did bring me closer to the handful of people who read it, and I’m hoping the same will be true now. Perhaps moreso since there are just more people spending more time online doing this kind of thing.

Tools

There are so many slick blogging tools out there, and they’d be fine, but a big big part of my itch to get away from Facebook is to get away from living in someone else’s world, profiting them, locked into their service and servers, doing things their way.

I just happen to like to tinker with this stuff, and this setup lets me do things the way I want, without being overly locked in to anybody’s hosting platform or system.

But this setup is most certainly not the blogging tool I’d recommend to everyone. Unless you are pretty knowledgeable about how to build and host websites from scratch, there are much better options for you to get your words out there (while keeping autonomy and ownership and freedom).

Without further ado, here’s what this site is built with.

       
Writing   TextMate It’s a simple text editor that I’ve used for years and just like.
Hosting   GitHub Pages It’s free and works well with Jekyll. Though it does require knowing how to use git, which is not something I’d advise for most civilians (aka non software developers).
Publishing   Jekyll Jekyll gives you a framework to make a blog-like website out of a bunch of markdown pages.

This stuff is for me, not you, but you can look at it.

To do

Pressing

  • category/tag-based browse pages
  • better index page (I don’t like the list of titles that you have to click through)
  • better way to page through posts (right and left arrows, “prev/next” links)

Backburner

  • find a better way to post photos than Instagram

Done

  • Figure out how to post from a phone I’m using Octopage if the mood strikes (it’s still kind of a pain in the butt and haven’t done it, but I could).
  • Figure out how to post pictures
  • Figure out how to post pictures from a phone