pt1 - pt2 - pt3

It’s been almost a month since launch and the site has already grown a lot. I feel happy with the state of its appearance and functionality earlier than expected, though admittedly I spent a lot of time making it happen.

There’s still plenty to do, but it’s increasingly feeling like I’ve got most of the building blocks I need to start shifting from functionality to content.

On AI assistance

ChatGPT has been equal parts frustrating and helpful in getting things done. Prior to starting this project, my familiarity with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript was around 3, 1, and 0 out of 10, respectively. Being able to use ChatGPT like an interactive search engine has been very useful for solving small syntactical issues, feeling out how I might implement an idea, and providing basic JS scripts. Sorry, StackOverflow — it’s not looking good for your future.

But interacting with the LLM has also been an exercise in patience. It so often and so confidently spits out wrong solutions and inconsistent code. It has a tendency to arbitrarily rename variables and even when you ask it to be concise, it loves to say more than necessary, repeat itself, and end every chat with a prompt. Gotta keep the end-user on the platform.

There’s a lot of time that goes into dissecting its answers and clarifying communication. And personally, I’m not interested in merely copy/pasting code without understanding what it is doing. When I do end up on StackOverflow, W3Schools, or reading documentation, I tend to learn more and get better results. But even accounting for the friction involved in using ChatGPT, it still saves time compared to using Google. Search engines have gotten so bad.

Probably the main reason AI has been helpful is that it integrates well with the typical learn-as-you-go coding workflow. I wasn’t very familiar with web-focused languages, but I did take Java courses in college and taught myself Python. I have a decent sense of how programming languages work even if I don’t know all the syntax, and AI is pretty good at teaching that.

I doubt it would be as useful if I had greater mastery over the specific languages I need. I’ve tried using ChatGPT for assisting me in writing, for example, but I’m a professional writer with years of education and experience. I always conclude I could write something better in less time than it takes to painstakingly craft hyper-tailored writing prompts. It’s just not that good.

As with coding, LLMs are better used as a search engine you can talk to — though as we all know by now, one must beware their fondness for inventing facts.

Coding building blocks

Fundamentally, programming languages are tools used to build scripts or programs that serve some function. The critical part is that you don’t need to learn everything; only the narrow set of things relevant to solving the next problem. (That’s really the case for all learning, but let’s not get carried away.)

Coding lends itself well to that one-problem-at-a-time approach because it’s very modular. When you learn a new trick, it becomes eligible for reuse elsewhere — sometimes very obviously so. As soon as you identify repetition in your workflow, there’s probably a way to automate it via some function.

When I work on a programming project, it is always an exercise in optimizing that modularity. Building a website from scratch has been like building a house, its foundation, and the tools and materials all at the same time.

Even though it seems inefficient, it is simply unavoidable in my mind. To avoid it — sticking to the house analogy — one would need:

• Advance knowledge of the type and quantity of stuff that will furnish the whole house (i.e. the content).
• Based on the above, an extremely precise plan for the layout of the house. How many rooms? And where? And how are they connected?
• A complete understanding of every tool, material, and technique necessary to actually build it.

That may be feasible with a project manager and a competent team, but I’m just one guy with limited web coding experience. This is why I was quite set on a launch-it-first-and-worry-about-the-rest-later approach.

I think it has worked out.

Major to-dos

There are still many things I want to work on, like:

• Add a Google Translate option
• Add custom banners for all content types
• Backfill keywords, descriptions, and excerpts for all content
• Rework tag system

And also the following:

Custom audio player

The basic HTML <audio> element is very limited and simply not good enough for my needs, considering half of my website is dedicated to sharing music. My friend over at enoodle.net uses Faircamp for the album side of his site. This seems like it could be a good solution if I had only music on my music subdomain, but I don’t — and I think I’ve decided that I won’t.

Besides, I’d like to challenge myself to create an audio player of my own. I’m hoping it will be good opportunity to properly sink my teeth into JavaScript, which hasn’t really been needed so far.

Better server hardware

I’m currently running this server on a disused laptop I bought in 2015. This was a great way to dip my toes into launching a website without any upfront cost. But it has a slow processor, slow hard drive, and consequently the connection to the website often times out (though I haven’t entirely ruled out other causes for that).

For the time being, traffic is light. But as I plan to increase my exposure and continue adding a lot of media files to the site, the laptop will not be suitable in the long term and I will need to look for a better alternative.

It has been a tough month. On January 22, I took my cat Data to the vet after noticing he had lost weight, his coat was getting ragged, and he seemed to have difficulty eating.

My initial concern was dental, but his teeth were fine. He was instead diagnosed with hyperthyroidism and started treatment. He got worse almost immediately and a possible gastrointestinal issue was suspected. Eventually, we discovered a mass in his inner ear. But by then it was too late. It had already caused nerve damage.

Data is now blind in his right eye and has little control over his tongue, so he cannot eat properly despite having an appetite. He’s frail and bony, weighing only 7.5 lb — down from a normal 11 lb. I remember when he used to be over 13 lb and I wanted him to lose weight. I would be beyond thrilled if he could be that chunky again.

Data is only 12.5 years old, which is senior but still somewhat young to be passing away (in human years, it’s equivalent to about 66). But I have seen the age creep into his face, and I have dreaded his death. Almost exactly 1 year ago, I had a huge crying fit about losing him and my other cat, Merlin.

I knew it would hurt badly when the moment came, yet despite this, I have been utterly hammered and staggered by the emotion. It is even worse than I imagined. Somehow, I love him even more than I realized, and I knew I loved him tremendously. It feels unreal.

Four years ago, my ex-wife cheated on me and left me over the phone. I sold the house I thought I would live in for the next 30 years. Her friends, who after years of hesitation I had finally begun to accept as my own friends, treated me badly. I had to say goodbye to our dog Millie, who I had proudly trained, named, and loved with all my heart. I moved out of state. We fought over what little money I had for almost a year.

I mention all this because it was, in short, a very difficult time. And yet, the prospect of losing Data feels sadder than the divorce ever did.

He was my first pet, rescued from the side of a highway when he was a kitten barely bigger than my hand. I got him a few months after my parents’ own separation and I stopped talking to my dad. Consequently, even though I was 22 at the time, it feels like Data has been with me my whole adult life.

Over the past 12 years, he has moved with me six times, and has been the most constant thing in my day-to-day. He lets me cradle him, he climbs on my shoulder, and every evening when I go to bed, he sits on my chest to give me head boops. He shows an enormous amount of affection and trust toward me. I feel so privileged for that.

Even now, he still climbs on my shoulder, and lets me nuzzle him with my head. Thanks to steroids and painkillers, he has just enough energy for it. Yet tomorrow morning, he will be gone.

One key part of this whole experience is guilt, but not the kind you might think. There is, of course, remorse over all the things I could have done differently that may have averted this situation. But the greater guilt is over a failure of empathy.

I know people who have experienced losses at least equivalent to my own, or even greater. Yet I did not feel for them the sorrow that I feel now for Data and for myself, and frankly would have struggled to imagine it in them. I think that is probably normal, but it still fills me with a sense of shock, regret, and shame that it seems so difficult to truly and intimately connect with others without having first lived through similar experiences.

If the loss of a cat can make me feel like this, I cannot even begin to grasp the vastness of the suffering that must fill the world. It is crushing. Whoever you may be who has gone through this, I am so sorry.

pt1 pt2

We’re live! I don’t have much time right now because I need to think of some place to take my beautiful girlfriend out on a date tonight, and she deserves some effort from me. So I’ll keep it quick:

1. This is very exciting. My own website!
2. Images are not loading. I’ll have to figure out what’s going on there. EDIT: Already fixed it!
3. Since I decided to go with two subdomains, I’ll need to think of what the music.klovys.net and main klovys.net pages should look like and how the three domains ought to interact with each other. Right now the blog side of things is the only thing I’ve got.
4. I’m happy to say I’m launching with a good amount of content already, as I’ve backfilled the site with a lot of older stuff I’d already written. I’ll keep improving navigation but I was hoping that when I launched, it would look like the website had already been around for some time. I think I achieved that, and given that I decided to start the website less than three weeks ago, I’m pretty proud of it.
5. I couldn’t get email to work during my YunoHost setup, because my AT&T router doesn’t allow it. I’ll have to figure out a workaround but I don’t think it’s too pressing at the moment.

pt1

Predictably, things have already changed. I gave up on LibDocs and other CSS templates after deciding that (1) The layout of LibDocs didn’t actually suit my site, and (2) It was far too tedious to reverse-engineer what the CSS was doing when the scope of my site is not complex enough to justify it.

Instead, I’m writing my own CSS, which is far simpler and thus more conducive to understanding what it is I’m actually doing and how I can alter it to accommodate my needs. Also, it’s more fun.

I’m at the point where I have a rudimentary site ready to go with some content, which means the next step is to go live, which means buying a domain. I’m running into a hiccup here, because I’m no longer settled on klovysmusic.com. The focus isn’t just music, so that would be confusing or even misleading to anyone being linked to this site because, say, I wanted to share my review of the Sirens miniseries.

Additionally, even if musicandmusings.com or musingsandmusic.com weren’t both taken, I think I prefer having my name in the domain — but klovysmusingsandmusic.com seems too long and complicated, klovysmusingsmusic.com looks like a scramble of unrelated words, and besides, I’d like to be nice to the dyslexic if I can help it. I vaguely considered klovysmm.com but I don’t think that makes any sense and would, if anything, make people think I was selling candy.

So I’m left with the obvious: klovys.net (.com is unfortunately taken). Thing is, I do prefer the feel of something like klovysmusic.com. There’s purpose in a name like that. You know what you’re going to get before the page even loads. I want that.

So I think I’m leaning toward using subdomains. One would be music.klovys.net and the other musings.klovys.net. I’d prefer .com but I suppose I should accept that just won’t happen. In theory, that looks good to me. In practice, I don’t know anything about subdomains except that I am probably adding more complexity to this whole endeavor.

Maybe it’s not that bad. I don’t know yet. That’s the nature of not knowing anything. I’ll figure it out tomorrow!

pt3

It is likely that I am writing this long before it will actually be available to read on the web. However, by the time it goes online, it will have been published alongside several backdated articles imported from other website I’ve used to blog over the years. And so, despite technically being my first post written for the site, it will be thrown into a stew of various other posts that will make it appear as though the site has been cooking for some time!

How long it will take to get it online, I do not know. I need to learn HTML, Markdown, and CSS before I can build a website I can pass off as my own. Fortunately, there are many easy-to-use tools all over the internet and I already have some familiarity with some of the necessary skills.

I’m also determined to get the ball rolling before I’m actually satisfied with a final product. If I decide I cannot launch the website until it is to my satisfaction, then it will never be launched. As soon as I have a working template that doesn’t look very obviously ripped straight from Eleventy LibDoc — which is what I did — then I will immediately move on to the next step, which is to get a machine running the site 24/7.

That means starting with CSS and server hosting. I’m hoping to use the klovysmusic.com domain, which would lead visitors to my discography and blog. The site would be called Music & Musings and clicking on the blog would lead to the klovysmusic.com/musings domain. Fingers crossed that whenever you happen to read this, those links are live! Or not. Who knows, I might think of something better.

That future can wait for sensible layouts, navigation, tags, and the million styling tweaks I will undoubtedly make. After all, whatever state the website will be in when it launches, it will not be its final form. So what does it matter if that temporary form is great, good, or even barely passable? As long as it has form, that will be something.

And it’s not like anyone is reading anyway!

pt2

“People pleasing” is a term people use, usually about themselves, to describe seemingly self-sacrificing behavior for the sake of others. There’s not a lot of stigma around calling oneself a people pleaser, because the underlying message is usually that one is “too nice.” It’s almost a humblebrag.

But it’s not a nice thing. It is, fundamentally, self centered.

I’m a people pleaser. Like most, I grew up around a person who was a threat to my wellbeing if I did not tend to his needs. Consequently, I became extremely sensitive to other people’s negative emotions, which serve as a kind of alert that I should be very careful. Negative emotional states have a nasty way of making me feel very anxious. If you’re in a bad mood, I can tell. Sometimes even before you.

Except that’s not entirely true. The adaptation works even better if one simply assumes that the people who can hurt them are always in a bad mood and prone to exercising their destructive power. Then one will always be careful and never make the terrible mistake of assuming one is safe.

The product of this constant fear, which one might call anxiety, is “people pleasing.” At any given time, I may feel in emotional danger if I have not done enough to prove I am worthy of being loved by those around me. So I act nice. I remain polite. I minimize my needs and invest energy into things I don’t believe in. How much is enough to guarantee safety? There’s no way to tell; easier to assume it never is.

This is the basis of people-pleasing behavior. It is a defense mechanism in service of the pleaser. It is therefore not altruistic in nature, but self-centered. Pleasing people out of an anxious compulsion to protect oneself is not the same as pleasing people out of genuine care for them. It’s common to act as though the behavior is a kind of tragic self-sacrifice for the benefit of others, one that hurts only the pleaser. This is a misconception.

People pleasers do sabotage themselves, it’s true — but they do not do it for the benefit of others. They are attempting to benefit themselves; and the real cost, what is truly sacrificed, is authentic relationships.

For about a decade, I have been writing content for The News Wheel, an automotive news website owned by my company. It’s shutting down in two months, and hundreds of my articles will go to the void.

My company provides logistic and marketing solutions for dealerships, and part of the marketing packages it used to sell to dealers included TNW articles that link back to their own websites.

For the better part of 10 years, my team wrote monthly content — typically about current car news — plugging 1-2 relevant links that sent readers to the dealerships. We generally kept the content related to the brands sold at those dealers (I focused mainly on Toyota and Honda) but there was flexibility, enabling us to also write evergreen content and, in my case, about Formula 1, which I greatly enjoyed.

Though TNW posts were included in our premium marketing packages, for many years we still wrote them for dealerships that only had the standard package. It was technically a free bonus for them, but we wanted to grow the website, and that required content.

It worked. Prior to COVID, we wrote over 100 pages for TNW every month. I personally wrote about 30 on average. The website was steadily gaining in readership, at one point earning about 600-700k clicks per month. It felt like the million was coming.

It never did. We had no shortage of creatives capable of producing well-written and entertaining content, but TNW’s greatest weaknesses, in my opinion, were its presentation and navigation. Over the years, some minor suggestions of mine were implemented, but adequately addressing the more fundamental issues would have required a level of investment the company was not prepared to make.

In the early days, we cared enough to pay for a user feedback service. It had a silly name I can’t remember. Anonymous users would be invited to record themselves browsing our website, talking through their actions out loud. This was intended to help us identify user experience issues.

I think it makes a lot of sense to care about UX, so it was always strange to me that when we reviewed these surveys as a team, the common group reaction was to laugh at the often-confused readers. Instead of taking their feedback seriously, we dismissed them as being clueless internet users and changed nothing. I was concerned about this and expressed it to my supervisor at the time; not long after, we simply stopped using the process altogether.

I could say the company didn’t want to continue paying for it, but realistically, the larger issue was that there wasn’t much to do but laugh at the befuddled users. We didn’t actually have the means to implement meaningful changes, so there was little use in discovering common user pain points in the first place.

Indeed, to the many suggestions I made over the years, the most typical response was that they were not technically feasible due to back-end limitations. We didn’t have the tools for improving website navigation, and the company was never going to give us those tools. That would have taken money. The obvious futility of trying to make the site better ultimately fostered a culture of apathy.

Then, we stopped writing TNW posts for the non-premium packages. We’d lost team members over the years, they hadn’t been replaced, and job responsibilities were shifting around. We no longer had the overhead to write extra content, and TNW wasn’t being prioritized. To make matters worse, COVID majorly disrupted the auto industry, and many dealerships chose to cancel services. We didn’t have many premium customers. I went from writing 30 pages for the site every month to writing about three. Some writers on the team no longer wrote for the site at all. TNW had been stagnating at this point, but this was a killing blow.

The bulk of the readership quickly went away and what little is left has been on a steady decline. TNW currently gets about 50k clicks per month, mainly from old posts still rating well on Google, and it’s not getting any better — despite a vague, almost ceremonial requirement that everyone on the team write two bylines for it each month. About a year ago, some higher ups, who didn’t even know about TNW for some reason, realized it existed and came to us asking for ideas about how to squeeze all the advertising potential out of it before they discontinued it. I suggested the best way to maximize the ads would be to invest in the site enough to grow the readership again, exposing more people to the ads, but that type of long-term planning is anathema to our corporate overlords, particularly in the marketing sector.

As it stands, my company will stop paying for the site in December, after which about a decade’s worth of content will vanish. I don’t know exactly how many articles I’ve written for TNW , but it’s easily in the thousands. Most of them are inconsequential, but I’m proud of a good number of them, as well as of the content written by my coworkers. I’m sad that the only thing left of all that work will be whatever we back up on our personal devices.

All creatives encounter a familiar difficulty: how to remain motivated about creation without an audience?

The answer is always the same. One must find the work intrinsically motivating. Write because you enjoy the process. Play music because you like how it sounds. Etc. Don’t do it for the likes, the views, the feedback, do it because you like it for what it is.

It’s not bad advice, but it’s imperfect. I can play music for myself fairly easily. But blogging? The whole purpose of this type of work is to have an audience. Nonfiction writing, in general, is not about the process. It is a form of communication. Film reviews are meant for moviegoers. Baking recipes are meant for people whipping up something in the kitchen. A piece of in-depth journalism is intended to inform. These have limited entertainment value for their creators compared to more artistic endeavors.

Activities like blogging, streaming, and podcasting are fundamentally self centered. They say, “What I do has value and merits being shared with the world.” The extent to which that is true is then measured by the attention and engagement of readers, viewers, and listeners.

That’s not to say the act of creating a piece of nonfiction can’t be fun. Investigating some political intrigue can be thrilling. Experimenting in the kitchen and coming up with a new recipe is exciting. But once you step beyond the point of creation and into the realm of sharing that creation, it becomes something else. Experimenting in the kitchen is just cooking. Sharing those experiments on a blog is blogging. And even if you enjoy cooking, it can be hard to find the motivation to blog about it if nobody cares about your recipes.

If you can’t garner an audience, you just have to be able to enjoy talking to yourself.

A reddit post asked what people would do if they were the last person of their sex left on Earth.

It was full of stories about how the last man would either have the time of his life, or be drained by a machine for the rest of his days, or be carelessly raped by lustful women because sperm banks would still be around, and thus the world would have all the material needed to repopulate without him anyway.

The stories about the last women were just as grim, if not more. Virtually every responder couldn’t conceive of a worse life, imagining an existence of endless and violent sexual abuse.

I’d like to believe in another story. I think it could turn out well, if you were the last woman on Earth. Humanity can do incredible things when it has to. It’s not difficult to imagine that most would recognize the sheer precariousness of the situation, and collectively agree that the survival of the species literally hinges upon that single woman’s wellbeing.

Thus the last woman on Earth could very well become a near-deity. As the only hope for humankind, She would need to be protected at all costs, lest all be doomed. Humanity’s primary project would be to ensure Her health and fertility. She would get the best possible care. And for the sake of reproduction, male partners would have to be very carefully selected.

Men abusing Her at will, as redditors seem to think would happen, would be a terrible long-term strategy for producing healthy children. It would be wiser to tend to Her wellbeing as much as possible, and I fully believe that most of mankind would recognize the importance of this.

Being perpetually pregnant until menopause would be very difficult, of course — though not unlike the experience of millions of women before contraception existed. Except, in this case, a lot more social energy would be devoted to ensuring Her care, and She’d have all the benefits of modern medicine at her disposal, as well as all the help in the world with Her (female) children.

Ultimately, She would likely have a good life and be remembered forever as the Mother of mankind, the most important person in the history of the world. We already have ancient myths and cultures that glorify and semi-deify women for their ability to bear children. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to imagine that if there were only one left, She would become the closest thing to a Goddess we’ve ever had.

(I’m sadly less optimistic about the whole story once fertile daughters enter the picture).

It’s the time for wanting to write again. At least there’s consistency in that, if nothing else.

Let’s try it differently this time.

I’ve been writing in my spare time for over 20 years. When I was 11, inspired by Harry Potter like every boy my age, I declared I wanted to be an author. I took creative writing classes in high school, joined a club, and spent most of my mornings in the backs of other classes, ignoring the teacher and writing stories. From 2005 to 2007, I also wrote 119 journal entries totaling over 60,000 words. I know because I’ve kept everything and I just checked. So much angst.

I went on to study English with a creative writing emphasis in college, then switched to technical writing before getting my degree. I’ve now been writing professionally almost every day for over a decade.

And I don’t consistently write in my spare time anymore. I’ve tried.

Time and time again, I’ve tried.

At some point in my late teens, around the time I became disillusioned with religion, I began to enjoy writing nonfiction. Reviews, essays, experiences, thoughts of all kinds. I suppose everyone thinks they have something worth saying at some point. There are a million unnecessary podcasts that seem to suggest this is the case. And while podcasts aren’t my favorite platform, I have started a blog more than once. More than twice or even thrice. I’m not sure what the count is.

And every time, it’s the same story. I get the itch to write, I start a blog like a new project, I feel a kind of excitement, and I stop. Usually pretty quickly. I tell myself that I write professionally every day, so it’s hard to stay excited about writing in my spare time, but I don’t know if that’s really the issue.

Is it the lack of audience? Readers would be nice, but I’ve never had them and never expected them, and that hasn’t stopped the cyclical enthusiasm for writing, so I feel it must be something else. I think it must be the same thing that keeps me from sticking to any one endeavor for too long: it’s hard, and it’s not always fun, and it takes discipline to keep going. Especially when it’s purely optional.

But fuck, I always come back to it. So here’s to trying again. I’m stubborn. But I’d like not to be stupid about it. My latest attempt at blogging involved a 500-word limit per post, which was my strategy for trying to keep things interesting without inviting long-windedness, which I’m prone to. But I eventually ran into the same issue I always do: perfectionism.

I’m always burdened by a feeling that anything I post must be extremely polished. I’ve been trying to get away from that in my life in general, as it’s really not a good attitude for getting anything done.

So this time around, no fancy goals. There are just two: (1) Write, and (2) Don’t care. I’ll just treat the blog like a personal journal — and hey, it’s not like anyone is reading anyway. I’ll try to write thoughts as they come up, link to things I’ve done when I can, and try not to care about importance, quality, or whatever might normally hinder me from doing so. I’ll try not to obsessively read and reread and reread and reread as I usually do, trying to catch mistakes and optimize and care about things like not allowing lines to be made up of just a single word.

The goal? I don’t know. Should I have one? I just like to write, and I’m trying to practice not getting in my own way all the damn time.