Why don't I post more?

It feels bizarre that version 1 of this website dates back to 2021-05 and yet this is the first post I’ve made that isn’t a note-to-self about how I set this up, or a “Hello, World”.

It’s not that I don’t have things to say: it’s more that I’ve struggled for probably 15 years — remember those final years before the walled gardens took over? oh what happy times they were — about the separation of personal diary from blog (what should go where?) and concerns of violating the Don’t Repeat Yourself principle (do I have the time, energy, or inclination to write something in my diary, and then produce a sanitised version for publication?). My diary entries in the last 10 years have become far less frequent than they used to be, yet often run into the thousands of words.

Arguably this is something that a preprocessor (like the static site generator used here…) could help with nowadays: just mark off sections to redact before publication such that the final public output doesn’t contain any trace of those files. Writing, then, could be as simple as putting the private sections in HTML comment blocks.